But just as the relatives we rarely see always notice how much taller our children are getting before we do, they also see these not-so-little lapses in manners for what they are: evidence of our horrible parenting and a clear indication that, like kittens, these children are going to be less delightful as they grow.
Ruling your own island may sound grand, but Adrian is less despot, more delightful, zany, scout master, tootling around his domain dressed in long shorts and Guernsey jumper, spaniel grinning as it perches on the back of his quad bike.
This Calypso is less well known, but just as delightful, and it gets extra points for being about the Australians being skittled out by the medium pace of Alec Bedser.
As a result his diary is less entertaining than Pepys's, but Evelyn's horticultural writing is delightful.
To have marched in the last legal Communist demonstration in Berlin in 1933 may have been an experience as delicious as protracted sexual intercourse (Hobsbawm's metaphor, not mine), but the experience of defending the indefensible and -- more insulting -- of being asked to believe the unbelievable was far less delightful and, equally to the point, very much more protracted.
I found Shoshanna delightful; I just felt her to be less vividly true than the others.
That leaves the task of pairing wine with pizza a bit more fraught than it used to be but no less delightful.
The less delightful news is that while the show airs in Britain this evening, those in the United States will have to wait until 2013 to (legally) watch.
I was relieved as a young writer to learn that "The Man Who Came to Dinner" (1939), another splendid comedy of theirs, in which the basic premise is delightful but less plot- and more character-driven, took months of hard labor before the two playwrights could contrive a sustaining story line.
