Deliciously free

From a languid lie-in and breakfast in bed to a freshly caught mackerel and a blackberry plucked from the hedgerow, life's greatest luxuries needn't put you in the red

- Madeleine Silver

AT 9AM the late Princess Margaret would take breakfast in bed, followed by two hours listening to the radio, reading the newspapers (which she left scattered over the floor) and chain-smoking, recounted satirist Craig Brown in his biography of the Princess, Ma'am Darling. It was based on an hour-by-hour description of the Princess's daily routine given by her 1950s footman David John Payne: at 11am she'd climb into a steaming bath run for her by her lady's maid and at 12.30pm she'd appear downstairs for a vodka pick-me-up before joining the Queen Mother for a four-course lunch.

It was a masterclass in no-holds-barred luxury. Because here's the thing: half a dozen Jersey rock oysters at Bellamy's in Mayfair is certainly a treat; a London best gun is on the lottery-winning wishlist; and being helicoptered in for the Tuesday of Royal Ascot would be a coup. But there's something deliciously slovenly about life's greatest luxuries that don't need to Give the plastic a battering; those slivers of self-indulgence that simply take a spot of planning.

Once something reserved for the sick (or a household full of staff), it was in Georgian times that affluent people started taking breakfast in bed as one of the many signs of their social ease, explains food historian and author of Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain Pen Vogler: "This is how we see it in Francis Burney's 1778 novel