I decided to flee the madness in London for a day and visit some old friends in the countryside, the 8th Earl and Countess of Carnarvon.

The late 7th Earl was an early investor in my first hedge fund and I have kept in touch with the family ever since.

His grandfather, the 5th Earl gained fame and fortune from his co-discovery of King Tut?s tomb in Egypt?s Valley of the Kings in 1922.

His early death, shortly thereafter, was the origin of ?The Mummy?s Curse? of depression era horror film fame. Many of his discoveries today make up the bulk of the Egyptian collection in New York?s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which the family sold to pay estate taxes.

Recently, the family has been renting out their 350 year old home, a 15-minute taxi ride south of Newbury in England, the spectacular Highclere Castle, for use as a film set.

The period drama series that resulted, ?Downtown Abbey,? unexpectedly became a blockbuster in the US where viewers, stupefied by endless low budget reality shows, were starved for quality, thoughtful content and adult writing.

It also sent 100,000 visitors a year their way, as well as $25 million in ticket fees. This windfall enables them to maintain the house and the magnificent gardens in immaculate condition.

The cash flow also allows them to ramp up the other family business, breeding racehorses for the queen. Portraits of past winners adorn almost every room.

After tea with my hosts and a personal tour of the estate, I picked up some tea towels for friends at home who worship this kind of thing. I also saw a display of some spectacular early Egyptian relics, which the family found bricked up behind a wall 60 years after the Met sale.

Given the huge reception by the viewing public, we can count on this drama to extend to six seasons, when it will then be syndicated for the rest of our lives. That works fine for the real life Carnarvon?s, who can now reinvest in even more thoroughbreds.

Who needs hedge funds?

I have just been retained by the British government to explore ways for the United Kingdom to remain within the European Community.

Needless to say, this means that I will be extending my stay in London for an extra week, save for a brief jump across the Irish Sea for my Dublin Global Strategy Luncheon on Wednesday, June 29.

It seems that I am one of the few people around who remember all of the economic arguments and complex procedures that led up to the UK joining the EC in 1973 (when I then worked for The Economist magazine).

Not many Brits know their own history.

I have received the blessing for this venture of both the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. They believe I am in a position here to advance American interests as well.

I have some good ideas that I think will work. If I seem cranky in my comments in the coming week, it?s because I?ll be pulling some all nighters cracking together some particularly hard English heads.

This will give me a front row seat to one of the preeminent risk events of our generation. I?ll be summarizing my recommendations in my upcoming Tuesday, July 5 letter.

It should be a barn burner.

Your Correspondent in London

Location: 48 degrees, 02.12 minutes North, 043 degrees, 42.08 minutes West, or 1,421 nautical miles ENE of New York.

The Queen Mary 2 is currently plowing its way through a massive fog bank a thousand miles thick, sounding the foghorn every two minutes. Visibility is less than 100 yards, and the waves are a rough 12 feet high.

The captain has closed the outside decks for fear of losing a passenger overboard. The weather has disrupted our satellite link, and our internet is down. So here I write.

One hour out of New York, and a passenger suffered a heart attack. So the captain turned the ship around and headed back to the harbor, where the New Jersey Search and Rescue sent out a launch to pick up the unfortunate man and his spouse.

That meant we could pass under the Verrazano Bridge three times, on each occasion deftly clearing the span by a mere ten feet. Talk about inauspicious beginnings.

The ship is truly gigantic. You must allow 20 minutes to get anywhere, 5 minutes to walk there and 15 minutes to get lost. When launched in 2003, it was the largest cruise ship ever built at 148,900 tons, nearly double the size of the now decommissioned Queen Elizabeth II.

It whisks up to 3,000 passengers and 1,325 crew across the seas in the utmost luxury at a steady 21.5 knots. You could water ski behind this leviathan of a vessel, if only the crew permitted it.

As a 40 year guest of Cunard and the highest paying customer on the ship, I managed to bag the Sandringham Suite, possibly the most luxurious publicly available oceangoing accommodation ever created.

The 2,200 square foot, two floor, two bedroom, three bathroom, Q1 class apartment on decks nine and ten included a formal dining room, kitchen, his and her closets, a small gym, and 1,000 square feet of rear facing teak deck.

All of this was a bargain for $56,000, or about the same as renting the presidential suite at the San Francisco Ritz for a week at $10,000 a night, except at the end you wake up in England five pounds heavier. Not that I noticed, though. By the afternoon, the two complimentary bottles of Dom Perignon Champagne were already headed for the recycling bin.

The suite came staffed with two full time butlers, Peter and Henry, who were an endless font of fascinating information about the ship. During one unfortunate cruise, eight senior citizens passed away.

The morgue held only six, so the extra two were stashed in the meat locker for the duration of the voyage. No comments were every made about the seasoning of the steaks that week.

I asked if Cunard ever performed burials at sea in these circumstances. They said they used to. But a few years back an elderly billionaire ?Mr. Smith? checked into a deluxe Q1 cabin with a hot young ?Mrs. Smith?, and then promptly expired. The grieving widow requested he be buried mid-Atlantic with the traditional yard of sail and a cannonball.

When the ship docked at Southampton, a much older, real ?Mrs. Smith? appeared to claim the body, and sued the company when informed of his current disposition. So, no more burials at sea.

Yes, the ship did hit a whale once, which stuck to the bulbous bow. When it landed in Portugal, Cunard was fined for commercial fishing without a license. The unlucky cetacean?s skeleton is now in a Lisbon maritime museum. Apparently this company gets sued a lot.

Of course, the memory of the sinking of the Titanic is ever present. There is a history display down on deck 2, and you can even have your photo taken in front of a backdrop of the grand staircase of the ill fated ship.

When we passed 10,000 feet over the wreck at 48 degrees, 38.50 minutes North, 50 degrees, 00.11 minutes West one day out of New York, the Queen Mary 2 let out three long blasts of its horn in memory of the lost. Cunard took over the Titanic?s White Star Line during the Great Depression and is therefore the inheritor of this legacy.

Peter is now at the door with my dinner, so I will continue on another post.