g
Cotswolds

Good Morning, Cirencester

Posted on September 19, 2010

It’s a shame husband wants to move back to Los Angeles because I’ve just located one of the key missing features of life there, at least for me. The Vietnamese have arrived in Cirencester, our nearby market town, and they bring with them not bánh mì or pho but reasonably priced pedicures in the aptly named Hollywood Nail. Even the salon is reminiscent of the Santa Monica Fifth Street venue I was addicted to for the five years before we moved to England. It has pale pink textured wallpaper, chairs that look like they were purchased at Office Depot, speakers the size of a ghetto blaster spewing out easy listening pop, well thumbed trashy magazines, and the noxious scent of nail polish remover.

Back in the nineties when I got my first raise at my first grown up job, my first splurge was a regular pedicure. The nail salon was on the corner of my street, right across from the laundromat I still had to use because I didn’t yet own a washing machine (confused priorities?). In my defense, flip flops are a plausible year-round shoe choice in Los Angeles so a pedicure had some practical relevance. With each move around SoCal, I always located my local nail salon with the same urgency that I identified the local grocery store and dry cleaner. They were always Vietnamese run, the Vietnamese having cornered the L.A. mani/pedi market like the Cambodians had with the donut market.

When I moved to England the weather negated the strict requirement for having year-round presentable feet, but the habit was formed and for the past five years I have been on a quest for the reasonably priced, utilitarian, yet thoroughly enjoyable pedicure of my Los Angeles years. Unfortunately a pedicure in the UK remains largely a splurge in which ladies indulge before a holiday to Dubai, and it comes at holiday prices. Lately I had taken to being shunted into a stuffy back room — purportedly a beauty room — in the Bristol Harvey Nicks because at least they give you a glass of pink champagne to accompany your £45 pedicure. Still I longed for the no-frills pleasure of the SoCal version.

Imagine then my delight at finding Hollywood Nail where the vaguely art deco looking desk consoles are manned by a task force of Vietnamese women and men, one who wears a Michael Jackson style surgical face mask and a giant diamond stud in his ear. This turned to disappointment as I was greeted in my undulating faux-leather massage chair by a young Welsh woman, the only British employee in the place, who took an extraordinary amount of time filing my toenails. Mid-way through she was dispatched to manicure a man and replaced by a young Vietnamese woman who loofah-ed my feet and painted my toenails with alarming and thrilling speed and accuracy. To celebrate I chose a color reminiscent of Chanel’s Vamp, the it color of the era when I first started getting regular pedicures.

Cycling Europe

A Week in Provence Part 3: Aups – Tourtour – LA?

Posted on September 10, 2010

Day four and I was grateful for the distraction of a day of cycling. It was a steady but pleasant ascent for the first hour. In La Bréguière we stopped at a small outdoor café for coffee. Across the street several games of pétanque were underway in the square in front of the mairie. The only other table was occupied by a group of four, one of them wearing a windbreaker from the Saint-Maximin pétanque club. On the table was a torn baguette and an open can of some dubious looking pâté. The leader of the pack — trim, cropped white hair and beard, shirt unbuttoned to the navel — was opening their second bottle of rosé, undeterred by the fact that it was 10:30AM on a Sunday.

“How French is he?” I whispered to husband.

I wanted to be charmed. I wanted us both to be charmed. But living in a small village as I do, I knew enough to know that if you lived in La Bréguière, this boisterous Gaul would quickly become a bore. I paid for our café crème at the bar beneath the watchful gaze of a mounted boar head wearing sunglasses, and we headed off to cross the scrub forest Domaniale De Pélenc. It was only 10km, but it was hot and dull and undulating. The market town of Aups was a welcome sight, and after a quick walk around the streets behind the market square we sat down in the shade of Auberge de la Tour. Pizza, postcards, and a pichet of rosé later, we headed out for the final push to Tourtour.

This was some of the nicest riding of the trip, hugging mountains to the left and, to the right, views across the Var of olive groves and villas. After about 10km, we started the final ascent through the winding main street of Tourtour, past its square and a few kilometers further to the Auberge St Pierre. The hotel is set into a hillside with a stone terraced pool and its own herd of bell wearing goats. There was also a tennis court, jacuzzi, and sauna, which, along with the village of Tourtour, were just enough to keep us busy for the two nights we were there.

The last day of cycling was both the longest and the easiest. We stopped in Entrecasteaux for coffee and quiche aux poireaux from the boulangerie, but otherwise focused on getting back to Le Thoronet. That night there was a wild storm. Thunder rolled through the hills and lightning floodlit the room. It was a perfect metaphor for an epiphany, but I had already had mine. When you start vacationing in places that remind you of home, maybe it’s time to go back.

Cycling Europe

A Week in Provence Part 2: Battle of the Farmers Markets

Posted on September 10, 2010

On our third day we freewheeled into Barjols for a visit to the market. I had read about the markets in the south of France in books by Elizabeth David, the English equivalent of Julia Child. And in Los Angeles, a chef acquaintance of mine used to talk about how these markets were the only ones she had ever been to that were better than the Santa Monica farmers markets. I had expectations.

The market was in a small square off the main road (where I spotted the woman in the photo reading). It was petite, just four stands. There was a handsome man selling handsome melons from Fox-Amphoux and another with stacks of gleaming eggplants, red peppers, and perfectly imperfect blush coloured tomatoes. Opposite was a stand specializing in goats cheese, each crotin hand decorated with either golden raisins, fresh herbs, or pink and black peppercorns. And finally there was the elderly lady tending her long table of almond biscuits in shades of pastel that matched the houses and shutters. The market was small but perfectly formed, and yet all I could think of was how the Santa Monica farmers markets spilled out for blocks, dwarfing this. And you could get chilaquiles. Husband was rubbing off on me.

I spent the afternoon by the pool finishing a mystery novel set in Marseilles, the kind of thing you are supposed to do on vacation. Husband lasted about an hour poolside before he retired to our stuffy room to text R&R with tips about their imminent vacation to — where else? — California.

Cycling Europe

A Week in Provence Part 1: Where Not to Take a Husband Homesick for California

Posted on September 9, 2010

I first read Peter Mayle’s rural idyll classic, A Year in Provence, in 1993. Last year, twenty years after it was first published, I read it again. The tales of languorous life in rural, sun dappled France had lost none of their appeal despite the fact that I now live in my very own rural idyll. This coupled with the fact that husband has put a two year deadline on moving back to California steeled my resolve to visit the region, and I’ve just returned from A Week in Provence.

The adventure did not start well. After landing in Nice we had a three hour wait for our train northwest into the Var. It was enough time for a seaside lunch in a posh restaurant had one been prepared and made such a reservation. One had not. We ate rubbery mozzarella panninis and nursed pastis in a smelly cafe with a view of an overpass while husband waxed lyrical about Los Angeles. It was the ocean front approach to Nice airport that did it. Even I saw the resemblance to flying into LAX.

Once in Les Arc the perpetually smiling Belgian, Ludmilla, met us at the station to drive us the remainder of the way to Le Thoronet, where our bicycles, dinner, and a night’s rest awaited us. All were in order but the steak — rare despite husband’s request for bien cuit — and the good night’s rest — blame smokey sheets and a barking dog. Buoyed by a triple carbo whammy breakfast of tartine, croissant, and pain au chocolat, we pedalled out of Le Thoronet and made it to our first winery, Domaine Sainte Croix La Manuelle, by 10:30AM the next day. The ride thus far had been indecipherable from say, Topanga Canyon, and now we were in a tasting room as modern and customer friendly as any in Napa. We were humored by a Frenchman with excellent English (if you clicked on the link, he’s the tall one in the back) who explained the difference between Crémant and their sparkling wine technique while upselling me on a jar of lavender honey.

We left our purchases for Ludmilla to collect — one of the perqs of being on a supported ride — and continued on the vineyard lined road to Carcès and on to Cotignac. Here amongst the plane trees on the main street we selected a table at the nicest looking of the plentiful cafés and restaurants, La Table de la Fontaine. I was worried for a moment we had chosen style over substance, hoodwinked by the wrought iron chairs, red patterned tablecloths and broad, cream coloured umbrellas, but the escargot Provencal put my mind to rest. Inside each of the eight miniature egg cups was a snail resting on a bed of tomato concasse surrounded by a moat of garlic butter and topped by a pillow of toasted crouton. Heaven. And they cooked husband’s filet de bouef bien cuit.

As we earned our lunch on the steep climb out of Cotignac, husband’s thoughts turned back to California. And it was more than a little like the Hollywood hills with all those Spanish tiled roof tops below us. As we rode on to Pontevès, the resemblance to southern California only grew. There were the same pink oleanders as those that line my grandmother’s driveway in San Bernardino, the scent of pine, the scrub clinging to rocky, terracotta-coloured soil. Even the houses behind our hotel looked like a miniature version of the terraced streets of Silverlake. In the center of town there was a departure with a medieval tangle of houses accessible only by pedestrian alleys, each with their door open and a beaded curtain for privacy. We wound our way to the ruins of the feudal château, backlit with rose gold light, and took in the 360 view of the mountains. Husband was back in California, granted a California of one hundred years ago. He sunk into a homesick slump eased not even by the evening’s daube Provencal.

Cotswolds

I am big!

Posted on August 30, 2010

Last night our resident rock superstar played a gig at the pub in the next village over. Sure, his heyday may have been the seventies and eighties, but there’s no denying this was a major coup for the pub—roughly the equivalent of Phil Collins playing at your parents’ anniversary party in your backyard—and a major social event. A major social event that, I hasten to add, I did not attend. I didn’t even know about it until doppelganger couple mentioned it in passing a couple of weeks ago by way of making an excuse for a far less glamorous invitation I had extended to them. At that point all the tickets were long gone and my fate as one of the excluded was sealed.

I thought I had gotten over it, but yesterday morning while chatting with J., one half of doppelganger couple, I was reminded of what I was missing. And just like that my frail ego flared up into a bonfire of vanity over the gall of the local community not to ensure my attendance at the soiree of the summer. How very dare they. J. tried to downplay it, complaining they had paid £40 each to stand in what was likely to be rain that night, but I was having none of it. The only thing to do was to sulk and then plan a fabulous evening of my own. For this I enlisted husband and R&R, all of whom had also been snubbed, and booked the cinema at our local country house hotel to be preceded by a meal at the village pub—the one where our resident rock superstar was not playing.

For husband our humbler evening could not have turned out better. As we sat down at our table, he clocked none other than his third favorite film director in the world eating dinner a few tables over. It would be gauche of me to mention this man’s name, but keep in mind husband is a film buff and his first and second favorite film directors are Mike Leigh and Ridley Scott, so calling this man third favorite is hardly a slight. (Some might even say he is bigger than the man who was singing at that other pub.) In the end husband was too embarrassed to ask the director for a photograph, but he was not too embarrassed to ask the waiter if the director was a local. It turns out he is, and is a regular in the pub on Sunday evenings. I think I know where we’ll be eating supper most Sundays this autumn.

My own redemption for the evening came later when we watched the film. It was Sunset Boulevard, which I had somehow never managed to see and was all the better for being shown on a big screen. Norma Desmond’s delusions of grandeur were as big as my own, and early in the film she summed up my feelings about the evening perfectly. To paraphrase, “I am big! It’s the Cotswolds that got small!”

England

Escape from London

Posted on August 30, 2010

The Boylestone Show and its giant vegetables came and went without us on Saturday. I wrote about my unforgivably blasé attitude in my last blog, but that wasn’t the only obstacle to our attendance. It turns out our longstanding hosts and pillars of the Boylestone community, B&R, abandoned their own village show and are currently cruising the Med. We were lucky, however, to be able to spend our Saturday afternoon in the company of B&R’s daughter-in-law, T., and grandson, J. They are friends from Los Angeles and were over to launch J’s boarding school career at Repton. It is a bold move for a 15 year old from Malibu to willingly launch himself into Britain’s public school system, and we celebrated with pizzas in south London.

It takes a lot to get husband to abandon the Cotswolds and drive into London on a Saturday, but seeing T&J was a worthy reason. In the process we proved that getting to south London from anywhere—even other parts of south London as friends who joined us from Greenwich proved when they hit roadworks—is painful. It took us three hours to navigate our way to Streatham from the Cotswolds, impeded on both they way in and the way out by traffic for the Chelsea match. (Don’t ask me why we went through Chelsea to get to Streatham from the Cotswolds. I blame the sat nav.)

In any case, we had anticipated as much effort and decided to make the most out of being in London by spending the night at the flat. We booked a film at the Electric for the evening and planned a jog around Kensington Gardens followed by brunch at Raoul’s on Sunday morning. Despite the Chelsea traffic, we made it to Portobello Road on time for the movie. It wasn’t until the film finished and we were wandering around the darkened streets that we realized our miscalculation. Most of Ledbury Road and Westbourne Grove were boarded up. Notting Hill was a ghost town, its residents all in exile in preparation for the annual Carnival that would take over the neighborhood on Sunday and Monday. We headed into Bayswater for some noodles and replanned the weekend. By 7:30AM the next morning our escape from London was underway as we bombed along the Harrow Road just ahead of the police putting up barriers behind us.

Cotswolds

Familiarity Breeds…

Posted on August 12, 2010

In this case, familiarity is breeding a lack of blogging. It has now been two and a half years since we bought our Cotswold cottage, which equates to three winters, two springs, two summers, and two autumns worth of material about flora and fauna, fetes, shows, harvests, hunts, the wine bar, the pub, the church, and the characters that populate these colourful landscapes. The problem now is that I am losing my ability to observe. Today I drove past a sign advertising an upcoming Plough Championship in Mesey Hampton—an event that in the past would have been immediately committed to the diary—without even slowing down. I realized I know two women in real life, not a historical novel, named Georgina and have not had need to comment on it. And worst of all husband and I are not planning on attending this year’s August bank holiday Boylestone Show. It is the mother of all village shows, the birthplace of our rural idyll dream complete with tea and cakes, homemade wine, and giant leeks. But this year we are off on holiday to Provence a few days after the show, and, well, quite frankly I can’t be bothered to make the trip. Clearly I am a woman who needs to get her priorities in order.

Cotswolds

How to Avoid Embarrassment and Be a First Class Guest

Posted on July 25, 2010

Saturday husband and I attended the CLA (Country Land and Business Association) Game Fair. That’s game as in pheasant and grouse, not Scrabble and Monopoly. And yes, I knew that before I attended. I even offered to drive R&R, who invited us, but they deemed arriving at the game fair in a Toyota Prius unacceptable.

“We’ll take the E-class,” R number one sniffed.

We also took their Norfolk terrier, Teddy, terriers being de rigueur at this sort of thing. There was in fact an awful lot of activity dedicated to dogs, including dog shows and hunting hounds and vets and people hawking pet insurance. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The game fair bills itself as “the world’s original, biggest and greatest country sports exhibition and showcase for rural life.” The website FAQ includes questions on whether the public can bring their dogs, their guns, and their helicopters when visiting, and the answer to all three is yes. Held on the grounds of Ragley Hall, a stately home in Warwickshire, the show amounts to a mass outdoor mall dedicated to all things associated with the British countryside, with a heavy emphasis on guns and fishing but with plenty of room for falconry, teak tiki huts for outdoor dining on the grounds of one’s own home, Airstream trailers (a rare American incursion), hog roast stands, and every piece of clothing imaginable rendered in tweed. To shop all day amongst this splendour costs £21 per person, which, judging from the crowds, didn’t seem to be much of a deterrent. As R number one observed, “What recession?”
We started our tour of the fair with a sharpener at the Pimms and Champagne tent, followed by a photo op milking a plastic cow and a hog roast and cider lunch. We then headed for Gunmakers’ Row where I was immediately taken with a ladies’ sporting ensemble of raspberry velvet waistcoat with pale blue silk cravat and plus fours. It was enough to make me give away all my personal details to Shooting Gazette (“Driven Shooting’s Finest Journal”) for a chance to win £1,000 worth of shooting clothes. The nice gentleman also gave me a copy of the July issue, which features articles such as “10 Steps to being the perfect gun – How to avoid embarrassment and be a first class guest” and “Confused by cartridges? The questions you never dared ask.” It is sure to make some amusing bathtub reading.

R number two, the only shooter amongst our group, accompanied me into the Holland and Holland tent, which looked like something in which you might take gin based cocktails while on a luxury safari. As we browsed he explained in hushed tones that guns here are sold in pairs so your loader — the shooting equivalent of a caddy — can be readying one while you are shooting the other. Prices can reach £100,000 per gun. Luckily, I was more interested in a fetching silk scarf with knotted fringe ends and a pattern of forest creatures reminiscent of French tapestry.

“Don’t hesitate,” a cravated man said to me in Italian-accented English. “They’re going fast.”

The hard sell took me by surprise, and instead of the scarf I opted for buying a round of ice cream cones for the group, which we ate in the British Food Village while admiring the local human wildlife. Even though it was the middle of summer, the look for women under thirty was knee high brown boots, a skin-tight tweed mini skirt, a tailored long sleeved shirt in pink or stripes — the kind I might wear with a suit — and a mane of long straight hair. The options for men seemed more varied, and my favorite was the lederhosen-evoking velvet bermuda shorts sported by a fellow customer in the Holland and Holland enclosure. He had both the height and the uber posh accent to carry off the look.
We ended the day with husband and R number two taking in a round of target practice, the evidence of which now hangs on our fridge. Worn out from our big day, Teddy and I both fell asleep in the car on the way home.

Random

Forget Me

Posted on July 24, 2010

Friday afternoon our office manager walked onto my floor carrying a huge, hand-tied bouquet of flowers. It was the birthday of the woman who sits outside my office and we both thought the flowers were for her. It was neither my birthday nor my anniversary and so I was as surprised as she was to learn they were for me. I double checked the card to ensure there was no mistake. My name was on the outside, and inside the inscription started with “poopie doopie,” a clear indicator they were from husband. The card went on to read “thank you for being so understanding.”

The flowers were my reward for a week of enduring husband’s latest fit of hypochondria, which in recent years has doted on various and assorted ailments including, memorably, colon cancer and AIDS. This time around husband had convinced himself he had diabetes. The speculation was less unreasonable than previous occasions given he had been asked to take a second blood test after a first one came back with high glucose levels. This coupled with the fact that his father had adult onset diabetes had convinced husband a diagnosis was inevitable, and he spent the week mining the Internet for other evidence to satisfy this conclusion. When the second test came back normal on Thursday afternoon, there was great relief. I was pleased husband didn’t have diabetes, but just as happy not to have to endure the nightly sessions reviewing his latest findings on WebMD.

The only other time husband sent me flowers at the office was in the very early days of our dating career. He had cancelled a rollerblading date at short notice and sent a bouquet by way of apology the following Monday. The card carried the message “Forget me.” The secretary and I had a good laugh at the melodrama of this instruction and then I did as I was told. Several days later husband called me, expressing exasperation that I had not yet telephoned him to thank him for the flowers. I explained I was just doing as he had asked and recounted the message. It turns out the clerk had transcribed the card incorrectly, and the greeting was supposed to have read “Forgive me.” The rest, as they say, is history.

England

Cows in the Sky

Posted on July 23, 2010

This morning on my commute along the M5, I witnessed a herd of black and white cows crossing an overpass. It was the second time in a week I had seen them, which confirmed I either was or was not crazy—I’m still not quite sure which. They lumbered along with heads hung, embodying the feelings of many a commuter beneath them. The sight was as unexpected as looking up to see Magritte’s bowler-hatted men drifting up through the clouds, and my instinct was to reach for my mobile phone to snap a picture. I thought better of attempting to photograph something while driving 75mph, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.