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Cotswolds Walking

Walk for a Spring Day: Snowshill and Stanton

Posted on April 22, 2009

A reader of this blog could be forgiven for thinking my sole source of physical exertion in the Cotswolds is lifting a wine glass to my lips. But husband and I do make use of our bicycles or hiking boots most weekends, and so I thought I’d add the occasional entry covering a particularly good ramble or cycle route, starting with our figure of eight walk last Sunday from Snowshill to Stanton and back.

Distance: 8 miles (approximately)
Duration: If you are walking with your partner, allow half a day for this ramble. If your walking group consists of only women, you can slice off an hour thanks to your intuitive sense of and ability to ask for directions. If your walking group is all male, best not to make any plans for the rest of the day and do remember to bring a GPS enabled mobile phone.
Difficulty: Moderate with some steep sections, especially if you accidentally veer off the path

Snowshill is that rare thing in the Cotswolds, a village with a name that sounds as picturesque as it really is. Other Cotswolds villages are laden with less charming names. Upper and Lower Slaughter come to mind, as do Northleach, Eastleach, and Lechlade which together form a triumvirate evocative of leeches and lecherousness. And then there’s my favorite: Cold Slad. (I wonder how often the final “d” on the sign to Cold Slad has been spray painted into a “g” over the years, misleading countless men with a fetish for heartless sluts.)

1. We start where we intend to finish: the pub. After fortifying ourselves with a ploughman’s lunch at the Snowshill Arms, we headed left out of the pub and walked along the road past Snowshill Manor, now a National Trust property. I have not been inside yet but apparently the former owner was a compulsive shopper/collector and the Trust has preserved his hoarded assortment of bikes, clocks, costumes, toys, art, and other objects that struck his fancy as he left it. If you’ve started to fight with your partner over directions at this point in the walk, it may be best to cut your losses and just pay a visit to the Manor or the lavender farm further up the road.

2. Beyond the parking lot there is a stile and signpost for a public path on the left hand side of the road. Follow it through the sheep field and down into the valley. If it is spring, this is an excellent chance to coo about just how cute lambs are and just how thick and skittish they grow up to be. Cross the stream and follow the path up the other side of the valley until you reach a dirt road running parallel to the woods. From here you can look back across the valley and admire Snowshill and the Manor and, in the other direction, the top of Broadway Tower. Take a right along the dirt road, which will be the last time that day your partner and you agree on the route, and follow it along the woods until it starts to curve around to the left.

3. Here you will have some choices, the clearest of which would be to join the well delineated Cotswold Way just off to your right. You may find, however, that your partner would rather argue about whether or not it is necessary to cross a field of bulls in order to progress to Stanton, throwing his or her Ordnance Survey map to the ground and accusing you of being antagonistic in the process (not that I know anyone who has done this). Best just to smile calmly in the face of this sort of behaviour and wait for the tantrum to pass before starting to make slow but firm progress in the direction of the Cotswold Way (which yes, I know, is where you suggested you head all along). You’ll have a good stretch of tense silence along The Cotswolds Way, punctuated by the occasional outburst that causes other fellow ramblers to hang well back. This is ok as asking them for directions at this point would be perceived as further proof of your “antagonism.”

4. After a while you’ll reach a crossroads where, if you’re lucky, a pink nosed, fluffy lamb will have broken loose from the adjoining pasture. This will give your partner a chance to “rescue” it before it succeeds in strangling itself by headbutting the wire fencing in its futile attempts to get back to mama ewe. Your partner’s ensuing feelings of heroism will help disseminate any lingering resentment towards you for having a good sense of direction. Pointing out that any old fool could see where to go just by using Broadway Tower as a landmark is not advised at this juncture, as it would jeopardize your credibility when it came to influencing the decision to go right and continue on the Cotswold Way into Stanton.

5. This is a lovely leg of the journey, where near-tame, chocolate coloured cows and their calves swirl around you on the path. Careful though. In your state of bucolic bliss you may impulsively suggest a shortcut that takes you off the Cotswold Way, through some woods, and down a muddy, precipitous decline into Stanton. Don’t be alarmed when you end up by a house called Shenberrow, a name that happens to appear at a different place on the map, a place you are pretty sure you passed about ten minutes ago. The Ordnance Survey people throw these kind of red herrings in from time to time just to make sure you’re paying attention. You’ll soon know you’re in Stanton when you arrive at a little of triangle of a green with a ceremonial coach light hanging from a wooden post. The church is to the left, and the pub is to the right. Naturally, you should head right.

6. The Mount Inn does what it says on the tin and delivers panoramic views from its two patio areas. We had long been planning a visit as the landlords are transplants from an excellent inn, The Plough in Cold Aston, nearer to us. Sure enough, Pippa the so-friendly-and-enthusiastic-she’s-practically-American hostess, was there. It was evident from the familiar, cream-laden dishes spelled out in curlicue writing on the chalk board that her partner, the chef, was also there. We drank Diet Cokes on the shady back patio before heading up and out on the path just behind and to the left of the pub.

7. The route out is more efficient than the improvised route in, and within twenty minutes you’ll be back to the site of Operation Lamb Rescue. This will stir up good memories in your partner so that he or she is susceptible to your final route alteration (my, you’re brave) which takes you off the Cotswold Way via some National Trust signposted woods. Soon you’ll be in another sheep field, then head right on the road all the way back into Snowshill. The pub may yet to be reopened for evening service but check around back and the barmaid may just serve you a pint of SBA and a ginger beer to enjoy in the garden, as she did for us.

Cotswolds

Husbands Say the Darndest Things

Posted on April 14, 2009

A sure sign you are considered a Cotswold local is when you become the recipient of the index finger wave. This greeting, exchanged amongst neighbors giving way to one and other on the narrow country lanes, consists of a quick flick of an index finger whilst both hands remain otherwise attached to the steering wheel. It may or may not be accompanied by a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod or ascent of the eyebrows.

Friday night on our way to the cinema we crossed paths with M. the barman, with whom we are on firm index finger waving terms. To our surprise M. stopped the car, got out, and walked over to have a chat. He couldn’t pass up the gleeful opportunity to remind husband that the previous evening in the wine bar he had made the following announcement to no one in particular and at considerable volume:

“I am very gay, my penis is very large, and I am very good at lovemaking.”

What is remarkable about this statement is that I didn’t even notice it. I too was in the wine bar Thursday night, by husband’s side for the entire evening. My lapse cannot be accounted for by my own drunkenness, enforcing as I have a two (ok, three that night) glass maximum following my recent health scare. It’s just that ludicrous remarks like these are such an old staple of husband’s banter repertoire that they don’t even register with me anymore. They, like much husband says, are filtered away by the hyper efficient mechanism my brain has engineered after nearly eight years of marriage. Apparently, however, such remarks do register with other people who are less accustomed to his verbal quirks.

Husband’s “gayness” has long made me the envy of my women friends. It amounts to a bit of sartorial flair, an eye for interior design, and a willingness, nay enthusiasm, for seeing “girlie” movies at the theater. Mention Richard Curtis or Merchant Ivory and husband will not only be first one in line but also the first one to cry. In retrospect, husband’s outburst may have been in the context of discussing his latest man crush on a chap named “Boot” (I swear) who had been in the wine bar earlier on. Mrs. R., with whom we were discussing the concept of the heterosexual man crush, also recognized the syndrome in her ex-husband.

Whatever prompted the proclamation, it is hardly the kind of thing I would expect out of the mouth of a man stricken by self-consciousness around his beloved toffy friends who frequent the wine bar like it was another room in their house. This is, after all, a man who has threatened to divorce me if I mention he is from Liverpool, land of track suits and petty crime. He can technically claim to be from the neighboring and more genteel Lancashire, having been born in a hospital in Ormskirk, and he has taken great care to cultivate his wine bar reputation as a Lancashire lad. I have long enjoyed chiding him for this fib, urging him to be true to where he’s from and who he is. I suppose I should be pleased; it seems he’s finally taken my advice.

Cotswolds

Why I Love My Town

Posted on April 8, 2009

…because it’s the kind of place where if, like last night, you happen to be eating dinner out at the local inn and at 9pm realise you have no milk at home for coffee in the morning and the shop is shut and nothing will be open before you have to leave for work tomorrow, the waitress brings you a little ceramic jug of milk sealed with cling film and tell you to just bring the jug back whenever you have time because she’s not bothered and she doesn’t charge you anything for it.

The End

England

The Grand National

Posted on April 5, 2009

The UK is in love with horse racing, so much so that there are betting tips every day on BBC Radio 4’s flagship morning news program, Today. Another regular segment on this show is Thought of the Day, in which a priest or rabbi or imam offers some spiritual insight in the form of a quickie sermon. That these two segments sit alongside each other without any trace of either irony or discomfort is perhaps the best illustration I can offer of the difference between America and the UK.

Yesterday was my favourite horse race of the year, The Grand National, which takes place at Aintree in Liverpool. We went into the wine bar to watch where M. was working behind the bar. He just happens to have a bookkeeper who is also a bookmaker—a dangerous combination if I’ve ever heard one—and so the small group that had assembled was able to call in some bets before the race started. (Between this and the wine, farmyard eggs, and homemade marmalade on offer, this place is getting dangerously close to supplying all my needs in life.)

I broke my cardinal rule of choosing my bets based on horse’s names that strike my fancy, instead opting for two tips I read in the appropriately named How to Spend It supplement in the Weekend FT. Thus it was that I had Snowy Morning and Butler’s Cabin to win. We also put £5 on Darkness to win after we realized that the wife of the man responsible for providing half our income owns him. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

At 4:20pm the race got underway in a manner fitting of the Mr Toad’s Wild Ride of horse racing. There are no starting stalls in The Grand National. Instead the forty competing horses simply rushed the starting line like a school or crazed fish. There were two false starts before the official let them get underway on the 4.5 mile course. The other distinctive feature of The Grand National is the fences, thirty of them to be exact. These are no ordinary fences. They look like giant hedgerows, taller than the horses, some with ditches and water features and names like The Chair and Becher’s Brook. The process of elimination—which is as much what winning this race is about as being fast—starts at the first jump when a handful of horses or their jockeys or both go down. This continues over every jump and it is a dramatic, sometimes wrenching site with horses lolling on their backs and jockeys in a protective, head clutching fetal position as they try to avoid impact from other horses still flying over the fences behind them. There are a handful of jockey-less horses still making their way around the course at any point in the race, oblivious to the fact that they’re disqualified and generally posing a hazard to everyone else. None of our horses won, but it was no small feat that all three finished. Only seventeen of the forty did.

Besides the finish line, another milestone was reached yesterday afternoon. Husband finally relaxed enough to start introducing some humor into my recent health scare, joking with M. about how it would go down in the community if he left me now that I am a “disabled lady.” M. wisely replied it would depend on how fast and with whom I then took up, a scenario I think husband had failed to consider. In any case, it was a good sign that husband was starting to feel a bit less stressed after the past three weeks of playing the full-time role of responsible grown-up and emotional rock.

I am feeling great but cautious, having made the mistake of spending an hour on WebMD this week reading up on MS after showing such exquisite restraint earlier in my treatment. It was filled with depressing articles called things like “MS and Your Career” or “MS and Intimacy.” But the thing that gets me most about my prognosis is the uncertainty. From here on out a diagnosis of MS is 50/50, but even if I am diagnosed it doesn’t offer much more insight into what happens next. The symptoms I could experience range from a little muscle spasicity or feeling like my foot is asleep to sudden paralysis or blindness at intervals of oh, anything from weeks to months to years between episodes. I couldn’t help seeing some parallels to the Grand National, first in the rapid fire process of elimination that got me to my initial diagnosis. Stroke, voicebox damage, and brain tumor knocked out in consecutive days like horses fallen at consecutive gates. And like MS, the odds mean little in The Grand National. The winner, Mon Mome, was 100-1, while another favourite, Hear the Echo, collapsed and died in the run in. I’ll take comfort in Butler’s Cabin, one of my bets, who finished in seventh but collapsed shortly after crossing the finish line. He was quickly revived by a dose of oxygen, springing to his feet to the relieved cheers of the crowd.

Cotswolds

Marmite Whirls and Farm Shops

Posted on April 3, 2009

Just when I think there is nothing new under the sun I get a surprise. The Cotswolds are like that. Any day now I am sure I will wake up and find the barren trees and hedges lining the lanes are overgrown with greenery and cottony May blossom. But already this week I have made two new discoveries.

The first was that I like Marmite. Or at least I found a foodstuff that contains Marmite that I like. The first time I tried Marmite was years ago, at breakfast with some Australian friends in Singapore where I was encouraged to spread it on my toast. This was followed promptly by an extended period of silent pleading with my gag reflex not to vomit on the dining table of these very nice people whose house I enjoyed staying at very much. In retrospect this might have been a bit of a harsh way to introduce me to Marmite, like giving someone their first taste of gin in a straight up martini rather than nestled in the loving arms of some Indian tonic with a slice of lime. This time the Marmite delivery was a bit more gin and tonic, spread as it was onto the buttery sides of some puff pastry and rolled up into a warm, savory pinwheel. For the first three or so I popped in my mouth I assumed I was eating some kind of cheese flavoured snack. A more observant person may have noted that the presumed cheese product was brown, but I had to be told I was eating a “Marmite whirl.” Imagine my surprise. First The Archers, now Marmite. I’ll be saying “blimey” in no time.

My second discovery of the week was the Abbey Home Farm Shop. I must have driven by it a million times, but Wednesday, stir-crazy from being indoors recuperating for the past week and a half (other than my Marmite eating Sunday lunch outing), I decided to stop in. The shop and café are at the end of a long narrow drive and it looked like someone dropped it whole from Topanga Canyon into the middle of a farm in the Cotswolds, from the Fair Trade coffee to the Indian print table cloths to the middle-aged, smiley waitress in pig tails and overalls. There is even a menu featuring multiple vegetarian dishes, which is quite a radical concept for this part of the world. In my delicate state I found it all very comforting and ordered up a banana milkshake with a broccoli and leek bake that I ate sitting outside on the wrap-around patio overlooking one of the farm’s fields. I was so taken I’ve booked us in for Easter Sunday lunch, for which I am afraid I will have to forsake the vegetarian options for the lamb roast they will be serving straight from their farm.

Random

A Room with a View

Posted on March 28, 2009

This morning I awoke to find my bedroom window framing the demise of coal size blobs of moss as they plunged to the ground. It was a violent change from the normal tree with field tableau. For a moment I thought these were the world’s first suicidal plants, then I realized it was a black bird violently shifting them from the places on the roof slates where they had nested all winter. It is officially spring, and I guess it is time for these blobs to make a nest for someone else.

I have spent a lot of time looking out this bedroom window over the last week as I’ve been laid recuperating from the after-effects of the steroid treatment, which was in some ways more debilitating (if less scary) than the symptoms. It is, thankfully, a rather nice view at which I could look more or less gaze indefinitely. The twelve window panes, whose frames are badly in need of a paint job, look out over a high stone wall and a large and handsome stone house behind us, a tree towering four stories to the left, and behind, St. George’s field which slopes up into a horizon of green, tree-lined hills. I’ve been to see the neurologist yesterday who seemed as pleased at my progress as he was stoic and scary when he first saw me a week before and broke the news. He’s prescribed one more week of looking out the window, then it’s a cautiously optimistic game of wait and see.

Random

Big Head

Posted on March 24, 2009

I have always had a big head, literally. If a hat label says “one size fits all,” I don’t even bother trying it on. I need “large” at a minimum, preferably “extra-large.” Over the years there have been both great millinery victories — my fuchsia, feathered Royal Ascot extravaganza — and disasters, as when my favorite Kangol white safari-style summer hat strayed into the clothes dryer and forever out of my wardrobe. But last week my brain decided to take the “big head” issue to new heights by engaging in what my neurologist terms “a clinically isolated incident of inflammation.”

I don’t mean to make light of my medical condition, but I hope that by demonstrating my good humor you’ll be more likely to forgive me the vanity I demonstrated upon hearing that my immediate course of treatment for an inflamed brain would be three consecutive days of intravenous steroid treatments.

“Are there are any side effects?” I asked the doctor, by which of course I meant would the steroids make me puffy. I am currently doing puffy just fine without any extra assistance.

As it turns out the steroids are an anti-inflammatory and therefore no puffiness involved. I can vouch for that now, having finished day three yesterday. The only side effects seem to be that I am fatigued and incapable of staying on my feet for more than an hour without becoming very tetchy. Which gives me time to blog.

The whole “incident” started a week ago last Saturday. Husband and I were out for a bike ride when I commented that I felt like I had marbles in my mouth. This continued over the weekend. I was finding it increasingly hard to talk, which is not without irony since I am well known for being a motor-mouth interrupter amongst both friends and colleagues. I felt like a drunk person trying really hard to sound sober or someone coming off Novocaine trying to form words convincingly. By lunch hour on Monday I knew something was wrong.

I knew something was wrong even though nobody else seemed to notice. I only vaguely sounded like I was slurring to my own husband. When I asked two co-workers with whom I share an office if I sounded funny they laughed and said only because I was American. Then one asked if I had been drinking and laughed some more. Trusting my instincts got me into treatment within a week of first recognizing something was wrong. And so concludes the public service announcement portion of this post.

Last week then devolved into a series of rapid progression, process of elimination medical appointments. Tuesday afternoon the GP put me through a drill not dissimilar to that of a drunk driver before handing me off to an ear, nose and throat specialist on Wednesday. After a camera up my nose to look at my vocal chords and more drunk driving tests, I was dispatched swiftly to “the donut,” or MRI scanning machine and given an appointment with the neurologist for the following Monday night. On Thursday the ENT called me during a break in the operating theater to assure me there were “no tumors or anything like that,” but to also let me know he had gotten me in with the head of neurology at 6pm on Friday. No tumors good, prioritised Friday night neurologist appointment bad.

The neurologist had me tell the whole story of my symptoms and did yet another round of drunk driver tests before he spilled the beans on my scan. I knew there were some beans to spill because he waited for me to put on my shoe before he’d start. Then out came the “clinically isolated incident” bit. The bad news was that multiple incidents constitute a diagnosis of MS. I had to ask if multiple meant two, as in if this happens one more time. It does.

I usually call people by their first initial in this blog since I am generally either poking fun at them or commenting on their prolific drinking habits. However, I feel obliged to give a shout out to my neurologist, Dr. Fuller, who refused to allow husband and I to get carried away with what might happen and instead kept us focused on the immediate steroid treatment. Dr. Fuller is tall enough to look like a retired pro basketball player and calm, gentle, and patient enough for me to wish just a little bit he was my dad. He even made a special trip to see me on Saturday at the hospital when I was getting my first treatment.

The hospital is a private one in Gloucester, a town I last visited in February for my citizenship ceremony. I am glad to be getting my treatment out here rather than in London. For one, husband can drive me and park easily. There is neither the hassle or the expense of taking a cab, just rather pleasant green space on the twenty mile drive between our cottage and the hospital. The hospital itself is more well maintained Travel Lodge than institutional. For the three days of my treatment I had the same private room overlooking a courtyard. There was a flat screen TV, a nondescript Impressionist framed print, and wood effect laminate flooring. The nurse wrote a note so the janitor didn’t throw my newspapers and magazine away. Each day a waiter brought a pot of tea. The doctor who poked me with needles every day was a Romanian named Elian who practised his English idioms on me. I didn’t mind because it distracted me from the vials of blood he was filling from my arm, except for the time on day three he tried to make a joke about having to take more blood but I didn’t get it was a joke.

The nice thing about the post-treatment fatigue is that I don’t have any interest in investigating websites on MS or Lupus (husband rifled through my chart to look at the second round of blood tests that had been ordered and blurted out Lupus, doing nothing to relieve my anxiety). I am surprised by my willingness to sit in the not knowing this week and attempt to recuperate, considering I am normally a control freak. I figure there will be plenty of time for obsessive medical investigation. Right now I’m more about Gilmore Girl reruns.

Europe

Picky and Pristine in Barcelona

Posted on March 14, 2009

In 2008 we only managed to visit the continent twice, enthralled as we were with our new life in the Cotswolds. Every weekend here still feels like a vacation, but nonetheless we vowed to take better advantage of our proximity to Europe this year. We even made a list, top of which coincidentally includes two cities that have recently featured in films, Barcelona and Bruges.

The other night we saw In Bruges, the story of two hit men hiding out in the title city after a job has gone wrong back in London. Colin Farrell plays Ray, who upon arriving in Europe’s hallmark chocolate box city declares it “a shithole.” It was pretty much the same reaction husband had to Barcelona last month as I forced him on a Gaudi death march across the traffic strewn city, taking him past the Palau Musica, to Casa Batlló and La Pedrera, then finally Park Guell. Taking in Park Guell’s unwashed masses and makeshift vendors miraculously hawking the exact same crap as their brethren in Venice Beach, husband could be heard muttering a steady refrain of, “I could be cycling around the Cotswolds right now.”

Husband is a very picky traveler, preferring among other things non-smoking restaurants with dinner available from 7pm onwards (a complete and utter rejection of the 1/8 Basque heritage he has been known to proudly cite in explanation for his perma-tan). I should have realized there were going to be fundamental Catalan culture clash issues, but there were grim moments in store even I could not have predicted. The tapas we ate in La Boqueria was some of the best I’ve had, but husband narrowly averted a pickpocket in the process. We pretended for awhile that a wine bar we found in the Gotic district was quaint, but couldn’t ignore the view across the narrow medieval alley of a souvenir shop selling authentic Catalan memorabilia like a Dolce and Banana t-shirt.

The pinnacle of our Barcelona misadventures was an outing to see Woody Allen play jazz at a swank hotel on Oscar night. When we noticed the signs advertising the event in the hotel window it seemed plausible. It wasn’t much of a leap to imagine that Woody, always a bit anti-establishment, would rather be in Barcelona than in the paparazzi glare of L.A. And hadn’t I read somewhere he regularly plays clarinet in a New York hotel? We were near the end of the Gaudi death march and, having absorbed vitriol from husband all day, I was rather smug that my relentless sight seeing ambition had yielded such a result for the evening’s entertainment. It was one of those divine moments of traveller’s serendipity, like stumbling upon an open air string quartet in an Italian piazza on a starry night.

Of course Woody Allen was by Penelope Cruz’s side in Hollywood that night when she won the Oscar for her role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. We found out after having taken a taxi all the way back up to the swank hotel. The maitre d’—who spoke much better English than the bellboy we’d spoken to in the afternoon—explained it was a Woody Allen tribute band.

Despite my track record in Barcelona, I am not disheartened from pursuing our European quest. We head for Bruges in April. I could be in for more trouble with husband if what Ray said about it is true: “If I grew up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me. But I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”

Cotswolds

Easter Comes Early

Posted on March 12, 2009

I was sure Saturday evening’s expedition to Toffdom’s Rural Headquarters, the Hunt Ball, was going to spoon feed me material for my next blog post. Surely it would be chock-a-block with eccentrics and their accompanying outlandish behavior, which I’ve grown to know and love in my year in the Cotswolds. I was wrong. The most outrageous thing I witnessed all night was a drunken nineteen year old who sucked face with her paramour on the dance floor for three consecutive songs. As husband is fond of saying, youth are so boring. We were home in bed by 1:30AM.

Well rested and hangover free, we made it to church the next morning for the first time this year. We were greeted by the usual suspects, six elderly ladies and one fifty-something man who surely attends in part out of civic duty to the golden girls of his village. The upside of a measly church population is everyone gets a job. Jean says Mattins, the lady who drives her Nissan Micra like a bat out of hell for the one block between her cottage and the church reads the Old Testament verse, the lady with the Danish accent the New Testament, the gent takes the offering and rings the bells, and Dorothy, in her orange pea coat, recites the Collect. This last one is my favourite. Dorothy’s prayer reads like an uber letter to Santa Claus, her requests ranging from a pony (“good health for the Queen”) to a trip to the moon (“peace on earth in our time, Lord”). I say this not to poke fun at her earnest and child-like approach, but rather in humble admiration of a person who has managed to retain these qualities after eighty years.

I on the other hand am totally godless. That’s the only way I can explain why Jean’s Lenten sermon made me think of the saga of our local Chinese takeaway, Dynasty. Jean was preaching about when Jesus had to prepare the disciples for the fact he was going to die. They responded with the textbook five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — not unlike my fellow villagers and I when faced with the recent shuttering of Dynasty. But then, last Thursday night, we had a bit of an early Easter miracle here in the Cotswolds. Husband, playing the unlikely herald, burst through the backdoor of the cottage asking if I wanted to hear some “fantastic news.” He was so jubilant I was sure that Inspector Closseau, his workplace nemesis, had been fired. But no, he brought good tidings that that the Dynasty woks are firing once again like a phoenix risen from the ashes. Just like that, Kung Pao Chicken Friday nights are back! I suspect Jean would fail to appreciate my loose interpretation of Easter theology, but it is nearly spring and I’ll take my themes of rebirth and renewal where I can find them.

Cotswolds

High Society

Posted on March 7, 2009

I woke up humming tunes from High Society, which husband and I went to see last night at the cinema in our local country house hotel. I’ve decided it edges out Love Actually as the best rom com ever, what with Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and Grace Kelly (in the best Grecian toga bathingsuit cover up EVER), not to mention the totally awesome mid-century patio furniture that features in most scenes except the ones in the library where a bar magically appears when you tug on a tome of Darwin. The movie is unfettered by political correctness allowing Grace Kelly’s character, Tracy Lord, to get plastered the night before her doomed wedding and snog both her ex-husband, played by Bing, and the paparazzi man, played by Frank. (As a trivia bonus I now also suspect I know where the porn star, Traci Lords, took inspiration for her name.)

Tonite is the Cotswold Hunt Ball and I fully expect, nay demand, all kinds of equally unpolitically correct and fabulous behaviour to be on display. I’ve procured a long evening dress with relative ease following my panic last weekend, thanks to a sale at Ghost. Undergarments have been trickier. Despite bragging about my Trinny and Susannah Miracle Pants in my last post, the truth is I bought an imitation “slimming pant” that was half the price. I tried on my dress yesterday and found to my horror that said girdle, while very effective at squashing in the right places, created just the merest hint of, gasp, back cleavage. As if the indignity of needing to purchase a “slimming pant” wasn’t enough. I was never very good at physics but I vaguely remember something about mass displacement—it’s got to go somewhere—so I guess the formation of a small ass on my upper back stands to reason. Looks like today’s agenda will feature a mad dash to the lingerie department at House of Fraser. That elegant pencil Grace Kelly never dealt with the challenges of back cleavage, but then again, she probably never went to the Hunt Ball either.