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Cotswolds Random

Making a Connection

Posted on March 15, 2008

Today on the Writing Time blog there was a quote from Walter Mosley: “The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day. There are two reasons for this rule: getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.”

That last bit is so true. Husband is generous with pointing out how disconnected I am with myself. (Sometimes I take this well, other times I tell him to fuck off.) It shows up in a variety of ways, from lost keys to a protracted series of chores where in the midst of doing one thing I remember another thing and pretty soon I am doing twenty things at once and none of them well.

It shows up in the way I check my Yahoo!Mail every morning for no particular reason. At best I have an email from my father with a collection of airplane nose art. This isn’t going to get any better now that he has discovered YouTube. Or there could be an email from a frequent flyer club, which can easily lead to an hour of flight searches for imaginary vacations.

It shows up with obsessive checking of my BlackBerry and working long hours despite my company going down the drain. Husband and I sometimes sleep in separate beds in London. One of the reasons I like it other than avoiding the farting and being yelled at for lying on my back (which may or may not result in me snoring) is because after my BlackBerry alarm goes off I can immediately check my email (Southeast Asia will have already been bombarding me with problems). Next I check my calendar to get myself mentally braced for what hell may or may not be in store for me that day. If I tried to do that while in bed with husband the BlackBerry would be promptly dispatched out the window to rants about what a complete robotic mess I am.

A month or so ago Vivienne Westwood was on Jonathan Ross saying something similarly brilliant to Mosley’s advice, about how distraction is one of the modern evils of society. Both Mosley and Westwood are right, and what they are saying is two sides of the same coin.

Writing is one answer, and I’ve just proved I have enough time to do it every day by listing out all the useless crap I do make time for. The Cotswolds also work in a forced “get in touch with yourself chamber” kind of way. There’s no Internet and the BlackBerry only works if you stand by the window in the kitchen. And trudging along the edge of ploughed field, up hills, through tall wet grass for miles on miles is as therapeutic as any couch.

England

The Gold Cup

Posted on March 14, 2008

I didn’t organise tickets to the Cheltenham festival, less well known than Royal Ascot outside the UK, but nonetheless a huge week in British horse racing. I must regain the enthusiasm I had when I first moved to London. With a little help from corporate friends and some patient queuing I managed a stellar sporting calendar in the early years —Henley Regatta, Royal Ascot, and Wimbledon. Thus far I’ve only made it to the Cheltenham racecourse for the Sunday car boot sale, a worthy but entirely different sort of sporting event.

I think I am sapped from my thankless job, but the truth is lots of tasks requiring organization—paying bills, booking travel, doing laundry— have gone out the window since buying Drovers. It took three past due letters from British Gas to motivate me. Chores used to happen on weekends, but now the pressure’s on to be “enjoying ourselves” come the weekend, especially if the weather is nice. That false pressure to have a good time that used to be the reserve of real vacations has, with the purchase of a second home, become a weekly event. Woe is me.

And so I watched the biggest race of the festival, The Gold Cup, on television. This was a much publicized battle between elegance in the form of the sleek Kauto Star, and brute force embodied in the gigantic Denman. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I immediately sided with Denman. As interesting as the race itself was the spectacle of the attendees. The place was swimming in gloriously vulgar hats that are as synonymous with English weddings and horse races as Hermes scarves are with French mademoiselles. I still treasure my own hot pink pimp hat purchased for Ascot. It may not be as versatile as a Hermes scarf but the opportunities in life to wear vision obstructing, fuchsia coloured feathers on your head are rare and must be taken.

Denman crushed Kauto Star, a victory for brashness of every kind, including big hats.

Cotswolds England

A Word about Fox Hunting

Posted on March 9, 2008

Since I brought up the subject of fox hunting in my recent blog about the Cotswold Hunt auction, I thought I ought to explain my take on this controversial topic.

First let me attempt to establish some liberal street cred. I’m a Democrat and pro-choice. I attempt to buy local and organic. I take public transport while in the city. You get the picture.

And yet I’ll never forget the look of horror on my London co-worker and fellow yoga class attendee’s face when I told her I’d spent an evening at a hunt auction. “You don’t support that kind of thing, do you?” she asked, bewildered.

I reminded her the nasty part of hunting had been banned for awhile now and explained my interest was more Margaret Mead-esque, an observer of the charming local wildlife (by which I mean the toffs of course, not the foxes). She still look confused, but downward dog put an end to the conversation.

My pub survey of country gentlemen and women consistently yields a “foxes are vermin” defense of the hunt. There are many stories of a fox in the hen house or amongst the flock. There is also the whole economy built up around the hunt—local caterers and pubs provide breakfast and lunch, not to mention the tourists. And there is no denying the social aspect. It is rather like a big all day party both for the riders and the observers, who move from post to post along the country lanes to get a good view.

Being American gives me a bit of an outsider status that parlays well into nosy, politically charged questions like this in the pub. I can, if you will, play dumb. But my nationality does not preclude me from participating in the hunt—it is in fact an American pursuit as well I’ve recently learned. An unpleasant experience mucking out stalls at summer camp that put me off horses for a lifetime is what dictates that I’ll never be part of the hunting culture. Still I am happy on the sidelines, indulging my closet gambling instinct at a fund raising auction or watching from the country lanes.

Last weekend husband and I found ourselves in the midst of a hunt while out on a morning ramble. We first came across a horse-mounted and hunt-attired father and his two sons, say around ages 8 and 12, separated from the larger group. We encountered them at a gate and they were disarmingly polite, well-spoken and self-possessed children as they gave way and let us pass. It was all very “no, you,” “no, you,” “jolly good,” and “tally ho.”

This stirred an epiphany in husband. He’s from Liverpool which is pretty much the flag-bearer city for the working man and socialism in the Western world (where Michael Moore goes to premiere his movies in the UK). There is much to be said in defence of Liverpool — The Beatles and European City of Culture 2008 to name two — but the city still has a reputation for being working class and tough. Many a punchline about Liverpudlians involve a propensity for stealing and wearing tracksuits. Although husband has traversed his difficult Liverpool upbringing, replete with parental alcoholism and mental illness, the class mythos ingrained in him as a child lives on. He expected these hunt children to snort with derision while instructing their horses to kick mud on us as they passed by. In short, his own class pre-conceptions, long dormant but still alive, were exposed.

Not longer after the hunting family encounter, the entire hunt party emerged from a deep gully. They charged up a hill, all blue coats and shaved horses, accompanied by a pack of hounds. We watched, a few meters away, as the handsome spectacle unfurled itself across the countryside.

Random

Consultation

Posted on March 8, 2008

The official email went out today. I and all my other colleagues in the UK are now under consultation, which is the British legalese word for “you might get laid-off.” It wasn’t a surprise. Job cuts were announced earlier in the year by the CEO in a dreary speech from the incongruous location of a stage in the Odeon Cinema. It was one of those speeches were reorganization masquerades as strategy.

The fact that everyone is in the same boat is not helping me take it less personally. I am trying to find solace in the fact that it’s a darn sight nicer than the same process in the US. I remember when my project team was “restructured” at my last job in L.A. Everyone was sequestered in a giant conference room then sent out one at a time to meet with the boss. I made the cut but my colleague, H., wasn’t so lucky. Upon being told to leave the building, she asked to go retrieve her purse from her desk. There was no need. While she was being told her fate, a security guard had collected her personal belongings and would you reunite her with them in the lobby.

One thought that has come to mind a little too readily is that pregnancy seems a daft option in light of all this. After all, employers in this country are not known for taking on waddling types of my age group and gender.

Books Random

Poor Precedents

Posted on March 8, 2008

Today I read an interview with author Peter Mayle in a FT Weekend column where famous people talk about their favourite house. “I go away less and less and each time I can’t wait to come home. That’s the true test of having found a place where you’re really happy.”

Our trip to Paris is the only one we’ve planned for the year, apart from a family wedding I have to attend back in the states. Our Cotswold cottage is passing his test.

I’ve also been thinking about how much more to blog about depressed husband and his adventures in pharmaceuticals. I read Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence when it first came out, but I don’t remember if his wife featured much in it. The FT article mentions he was on his second marriage when he wrote it. It doesn’t mention if his first wife divorced him for being mentioned in a book.

Years ago I read Frances Mayes’ Tuscany books, and I vaguely remember her mentioning her husband. My recollection was that he was wonderful and her second one. I am getting worried I may need to divorce husband and get married again before I can write anything useful on the subject of him and depression.

The only memoir of recent years I can think of where the husband features prominently is one of my favourites, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. That starts with her husband dropping dead.

This isn’t helping.

Europe

Adieu Paris

Posted on March 3, 2008

The email came today, the news I had been dreading. Our friend D. is letting his apartment in Paris go. The one on the Île Saint-Louis. The one on the top floor of the 17th century building with the vast interior courtyard and dramatic marble staircase and plaster rosettes on the ceiling and views of the Seine. The one he doesn’t even live in, so husband and I could visit whenever we wanted.

That one.

I wrote back to ask why, trying not to act too upset. Apparently he is buying land in Australia to build a house. Australia for God sake. I wanted to reach out through Yahoo! mail and shake him. What’s Australia got that Paris doesn’t?

There’s time for one last visit. A final chance to catch the faint whiff of vinegar when you first open the wedgewood blue door, followed by the uber detergent smell of ultra hygiené French dish washing soap; to walk on the creaky parquet floorboards past the gloss royal blue dining room wall hung with the mounted jackelope; to hear the sound the hot water heater makes as it chugs into action when you turn on the shower in the bathroom with the broken skylight and the mirrored wall; to lay in bed and watch the ceiling rosette turn pink with the lights from the tourist boats gliding by on the Seine below; to unwrap a paper package of fresh croissants on the coffee table with the tall windows thrown open.

It will be April in Paris for our last visit, perfect weather for the simple luxury of an evening out in the Marais where visit after visit we repeat the same routine. First to Au Fer au Cheval where we will hope they will offer with our drinks a plate of tortilla or little pieces of bread with ham or cheese or gherkins, not the peanuts! Then across the street to La Belle Hortense where the middle-aged and vaguely Goth barmaid (forever in my mind wearing an electric blue dress and black boots) pours wine and makes coffee and smokes. Then back across the street to Les Philosophes for a dinner of tomato tatin and carnard confit in miele with Cote du Rhone blanc.

The first time we went to Paris after moving to London, D. suggested we make ourselves a copy of the key at the BHV, that marvel of a Parisian department store. I’ve carried that key around with me ever since, a symbol of our new European life. The truth is that since we got our Cotswold cottage, we’ve been neglecting Paris. Its existence will soften the blow of our lost Paris hideaway. Still, I think I’ll keep the key.

Random

Ritalin Vacation

Posted on February 23, 2008

Husband started taking Ritalin in December. This isn’t the first medication related to depression that he’s been on. That honour goes to a medication used to treat incontinence in old ladies that happens to have some kind of anti-depressant side effect. At least that’s what the shrink told husband, which made both husband and me wonder about the wisdom of venturing onto the anti-depressant meds frontier in the, shall we say, less progressive world of British mental health care. (Never mind the bedside manner issues associated with telling a depressed, middle-aged, adult male that he’s going onto pills that help grannies with wee problems.)

Husband and I are both veterans of therapy from our years in L.A. In the great nature vs. nurture debate, his southern California mental health professional favoured nurture, which in turn led her to an anti-medication bias. Her logic was that you need to deal with the underlying issues, not just rely on medication. And so husband dutifully dealt with those issues, putting in hard time on the couch and in group therapy with me. This gave us both awareness and fluency and comprehension of root causes, all of which were helpful and necessary, but only go so far towards managing the damn thing if you’re the person in the thick of it. The problem seems to be that if you are in a very dark place, you can’t muster the will to use skills you may have acquired when you weren’t in the dark place. You may not even be able to get up off the couch.

The depression kept coming back, as is its habit, until finally it got so bad that husband broke with principles and got a prescription. This was not without angst. The abstinence from meds to date had been something of a badge of honour. Husband was dealing with his demons the hard way, rather like I imagine John Wayne would have done it. There were a few things that helped to rationalize the decision, two of which came from our time in LA as zen practitioners. One was the lesson that as soon as you recognize you are standing on a position, it’s probably worth considering get off of it. The second was the memory of a woman priest who practiced with us and was dying of cancer. The pain had become unbearable, but she was wary of going onto pain killers knowing they might make her out of it. The sensai would hear nothing of it, insisting she take the morphine — he called it “dharma-cology” to make her feel better about it. And finally, I realized in a very real, living up close with the demons kind of way that whatever caused what was happening, be it nature or nurture, it was a physiological thing and it made sense that something that has a physiological effect might help.

The incontinence medicine didn’t work out so well. You might not wet your pants anymore but you’ll feel pretty speedy. That’s when Ritalin came on the scene, which is better known for treating hyperactive nine-year old boys than depression. Husband’s inability to focus wasn’t in the pre-adolescent, pogo-sticking around in circles sense. It was more a ‘what’s the point of anything when humans are all shit yet I still need to get this PowerPoint done by noon’ kind of thing. Since it is one of husband’s most life affecting symptoms of the depression, it’s what got treated. And it seems to work.

Which is why it was a surprise when husband informed me he’s decided to take a Ritalin vacation. Specifically he’s decided to forego the meds for the three days per week we’re in the Cotswolds. He says he feels better when we’re out here. There’s something about the fresh air, the peace and quiet, the wide open spaces. I buy this, but I also suspect this experiment is borne out of a lingering feeling that the meds are somehow wrong, and now that he’s found an escape valve from the stress of London he doesn’t or shouldn’t really need them. As Jessica Apple wrote in the FT on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Prozac: “We may indeed be a Prozac Nation, but one thing remains clear: we’ve yet to come to terms with our diagnosis.”

Earlier in my married life this news would have caused me great distress. I would have been on WebMD scouring the implications and freaking out that husband was making changes to his meds without consulting a physician. But not now. I’m married enough to know any protest would be a waste of energy. He is going to do this experiment whether I like it or not. On the one hand, it’s his body, and he has the right to determine what he puts into it. On the other hand, it is asking rather a lot of me. This means only his colleagues, many of whom he loathes, will be the beneficiaries of the drugs. Surely as the wife I should get something out of this too. He might be the lab rat, but I’m the hamster’s wheel, having to spin like crazy or not depending on the day’s experiment.

Cotswolds

Money Pit

Posted on February 16, 2008

After weeks of trying to pretend an Egyptian rug on a concrete floor and an Ikea table and chairs left by the last owners were comfortable and/or cozy, today I made some progress in the cottage-ification of the interior of Drovers. Naturally I went to Laura Ashley, my first visit since the mid-eighties when my mother took advantage of the favourable exchange rate to festoon my sister and me in drop-waist florals from Sloane Square. (Another artifact from that era, a navy blue Burberry wax coat, is totally apropos of my new Gloucestershire life. That it is moth bitten just makes it more so). I left with orders placed for one antiqued brass-effect reading lamp, a saddle brown leather couch and footstool, and a pair of red and beige gingham checked curtains. The floral drop-waists with lace collars have been retired, but my cottage will soon be clad in the interior design equivalent.

Next was a visit to the antiques arcade. This Aladdin’s cave of fox hunting prints and horse brasses is far more ‘curated garage sale’ than Christie’s, which is just as well given the damage from my Laura Ashley haul. I left with a hammered brass coal scuttle and some Vanity Fair prints for under £70. I am slightly worried the print depicting a turbaned Punjabi polo player might be construed as racist, but the companion print of a mustachioed, barrel-torsoed Englishman captioned “I Say” looks equally ridiculous. I should be more worried our cottage is going to look like a pub.

Near the Risdales we discovered a gigantic reclamation yard, a paradise for newbies like us striving for the Cotswold look. Outside is a vast graveyard for stone ornaments – toadstools, orbs, troughs, and bird baths – that are the garden gnomes of the Cotswolds. I had been warned that you can tell weekenders by the reproduction coach lights hanging on their barn conversions. I suspect a disused wagon wheel in the garden sends the same message, but I got one anyway (the garden is fenced in, protecting my cliché from public scorn).

Inside the proprietor produced a pock marked length of elm we’ll turn into a mantle piece, and a ledge and brace pine door for the kitchen. I noticed the 1930s suitcase, the one I’ll decorate with replica vintage luggage labels from The Pompidou Centre and plop in that empty spot underneath the stairs, as I was paying for the other stuff. Better throw in the ink jars to decorate the chest of drawers and a handful of dusty hardbacks for good measure.

Cotswolds

Somewhere Over the Corduroy Rainbow

Posted on February 3, 2008

Before the Cotswold Hunt Grand Auction, the sum total of my experience at rural auctions was the annual Boylestone Show, where the highest grossing item last year was a £13 bottle of homemade”vintage” 1996 dry hawthorn wine. I know because my host at that event was involved in the nasty bidding war, finally standing down at £12.90. The atmosphere was just as tense last night at the Cotswold Hunt Grand Auction when bidding on a fruitcake reached £400. Our experience bidding on jams and cakes at Boylestone had clearly left us unprepared for this, an introduction of sorts to Cotswold society.

Sure I had studied the Hunt Auction’s little green catalogue I had found at the wine bar the week before. Just reading through the lots was entertaining, not to mention an introduction to a whole new vocabulary of gallops and jollys and such. There were 105 of them, and every base was covered:

  • Practical – house sitting; babysitting; an airport chauffeur; a week’s boarding in kennels; a housekeeper for a day.
  • Food – a large game pie, “ideal for your point to point picnic”; a side of smoked salmon; half a lamb, butchered and jointed; a whole cooked ham joint; a large fruitcake; pub dinners.
  • Luxury – 250g Oscieytre Caviar; 1 case of Chateau Beychevelle; homes in Provence and Switzerland.
  • Horsey – equine sports massage; transport for three horses; animal portraiture; horse dentistry sessions; bales of hay; trail hunting; and my two favourites, “jolly on your horses” or “a morning on the gallops” followed by breakfast with trainer.
  • Horsey Luxury – A polo lesson with Lavinia Black; a membership subscription to Cirencester Park Polo club; shares in a 2-horse syndicate; a dressage lesson with Sandy Phillips.
  • Bizarre – work for half a day with taxidermist (adult or child 10 years or over). Specimen can be provided.

There was also a lot of name dropping going on in the donor list. Even I, the uninitiated, recognized Captain Mark Phillips, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, David Hicks, and a few local lords. Lured by the promise of complimentary preview drinks and canapés (husband is from Liverpool after all), we arrived at the local hall in plenty of time with £210 of cash burning a hole in our pockets. We perused the lots, admiring an old hunting map and arguing over the tastefulness of a pasta bowl decorated with horses, hounds and a fox in the middle. With so many of the lots being “experiences” rather than loot, the preview was over quickly.

We shuffled about the room a bit, sheepish, then retired to a wall to critique the toffs. Gloucestershire’s support of the corduroy industry was on full display. This fabric is the upper class man’s license to dress in loud colours. Nevermind if it’s electric moss green, a shade I didn’t know existed until that evening. It’s made of corduroy. One gentleman of about fifty stood out in a a mélange of clashing yellows: mustard corduroy trousers paired with a canary coloured checked shirt and a marigold tie speckled with pheasants. I’d guess the trousers had not fit him properly for a good ten years by the way they cupped his buttocks. It looked uncomfortable but he seemed entirely at ease, a master mingler.

The women fell into two sartorial categories: she-man with wool cape, which husband calls Jolly Hockey Sticks, and horsey chic, which includes rabbit fur vests, expensive boots worn over tight jeans, and meticulous haircuts. Both are equally confident and friendly. (I have found there is a refreshing lack of correlation between looks and confidence in England compared to L.A.) One of the women in the horsey chic category from the organizing committee approached us and made a bit of friendly small talk, asking us if we’d reviewed the lots. “Oh, yes, lovely things,” we told her. “Oh, yes,” she agreed and confided she was in custody of a number of “at any cost” bids for friends who couldn’t make it. The catalogue had mentioned Internet bidding at chunt.com (I’m not making that url up). Another sign we weren’t in Boylestone anymore.

The first lot of the auction was dinner for two with a bottle of wine at a pub in the next village over from ours. Bidding started at £40, and I went in at £50. In a flash the gavel came down, and I found dinner was mine at £70. Now the auctioneer was asking my name. “Jennifer,” I said. “Jenni-furr”, he repeated back. (Was he mocking my American accent?). “Last name?” I told him, quietly.“A bit louder please,” his matronly sidekick demanded. This time I nearly shouted, eager for the auctioneer to move on to bidding on a day of trail hunting on the Duke of Beaufort’s Hunt so all those corduroy enshrouded eyes would move off of me. The flush of early success had been replaced with self-consciousness. My husband was staring at me in disbelief, as if to distance himself, as if to say to everyone in the hall, my wife may be a stupid idiot who would spend £70 on a pub dinner, but no, not me.

It was not until lot 6, “A hunting special large fruit cake” made by someone named Peggy went for £400 after a feverish round of bidding that my husband conceded that perhaps my £70 pub dinner was not such a bad deal. The bidding continued and we happily quaffed glasses of red wine while admiring the spectacle. When the lot consisting of use of a cherry picker for one week came up, husband suggested we bid on it then park it outside the window of the neighbour who told him he couldn’t park our car on the road outside our cottage. Tipsy, we laughed uproariously. Shortly into the laugh I thought, “we are having a spontaneous moment of pure laughter” then looked around to make sure others in the room who may have earlier thought “who are they?” could see us having our moment of pure spontaneous laughter so they would know we were a fun-loving couple having a smashing time at the auction. I paused then laughed some more to cement the point.

After the auction ended, we shuffled back for last call at the wine bar where only barman R., and a man from one village over remained (two more stalwarts in the corduroy rainbow). Somehow we started discussing the love-hate relationship between Britain and France. Historical references abounded and I tried to nod knowingly as the conversation moved effortlessly from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Carla Bruni. Thank God I had just read something in The New Yorker about how Sarkozy courts the press that I could slide in. I made a mental note to brush up on my history (at least read a historical novel) just as the two gents started comparing total takes of this hunt auction (£34k!) vs their own (£25k and £45k respectively). I also learned that the man from one village over went to Westminster School for Boys, which meant nothing to me until it was explained. It’s posh and all that, but I found it most interesting that someone of this gent’s age, 60-ish, was still slipping his school pedigree into conversation. When I went to pay for our wine R. informed me that man from the next village had taken care of it. My protests were met with an impassive reply of, “No, no, let him pay for it, he’s very rich.”

Cotswolds

A Chocolate Box

Posted on January 26, 2008

It was about 9 months between the time we first visited the Pudding Club and when we finally picked up the keys to our very own honey-coloured stone cottage. Still, we spent most weekends during that period in the Cotswolds, my bank statements a testament to our heavy investment in the B&B sector last summer.

The regular visits started in June when my mother-in-law became very ill and went into the hospital in Lancaster. After each visit up North, we would stop in the Cotswolds on our way back to London for a bit of solace from the death that was playing out in front of us. Dinner in a pub would inevitably turn into an enquiry about a room. It was during these stopovers that husband threw himself into a property search with typical zeal (he is real estate obsessed, logging considerable quality time each week with television “friends” like Phil and Kirsty). In retrospect the sudden obsession with a place in the country was probably a grief avoidance tactic, but I too was grateful for the distraction. And so it was that much of our exploration of the area was at the mercy of estate agents.

One of the first places an agent tooks us was to the village of G.P., to see a slightly dilapidated chocolate box cottage in a village full of chocolate boxes nestled in sheep-strewn green hills. That the village came equipped with two pubs and a post office was a bonus. We fell hard for the impractical one up / one down with a leaking roof and cobweb-covered windows even though it could never reasonably be anything more than a holiday home.

We made a low-ball offer, but one that was still financially reckless for us. Oblivious to the mercy of his actions, the owner rejected it. But shortly thereafter he offered a sweet deal on a long-term weekend rental, presumably on the theory that the test drive would convince us to up our offer. Thus the vilage of G.P. became our weekend retreat from which we watched the credit crisis and property crash develop while we looked for our perfect weekend retreat.