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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.

Cotswolds

The Pudding Club

Posted on January 25, 2008

Like many things in my life, my first visit to the Cotswolds was motivated by food. I was lured by The Pudding Club, a twice-monthly gorge fest of traditional English desserts, like Spotted Dick and Jam Roly Poly, hosted at a North Cotswold hotel. Since moving to England I had this idea of undertaking “the great pudding tour” to visit the namesakes of my favourite desserts, including Bakewell (tart) in the Peak District and Eccles (cake) in Manchester. I kind of ran out of ideas after that unless I really started stretching. A bus ride across London to Chelsea for a Chelsea bun? Could I blag my way into that esteemed institution for boys, Eton, for the lowdown on broken meringue and fruit known as Eton Mess without coming across like a pervey middle-aged woman? The Pudding Club seemed like a clever if slightly less interesting way to shortcut all this. Husband, also a glutton, was happy to tag along.

The Pudding Club itself turned out to be a disappointment — lots of stodge and a setting that was a little too Marriott conference room. The real highlight of the weekend was the two days of guided walks, led by The Cotswolds Wardens. Husband and I like to combine physical activity with our indulgence to ease the guilt, the next most recent example being an Alsace “cycling trip” during which we did manage to fit in some biking between the pork and Gewurtztraminer.

Our transformation to ramblers –fancy English word for hikers as far as I can tell—had begun. I knew it was so when several weeks later I found myself in a sporting goods store in the touristy Cotswold village of Broadway clutching several hundred pounds worth of waterproof gear, including a geeky and now well worn map holder “necklace,” and handing over my Visa card.

California England

The First Hop: Los Angeles to London – May 2005

Posted on January 19, 2008

Before I can explain how I ended up in the Cotswolds, I guess I have to explain how I ended up in England at all. Los Angeles was my home for a decade before moving to England. I spent the six years previous to L.A. living variously in North Carolina, Italy, Singapore, and Malaysia. In L.A., for the first time in a long time, I was exactly where I wanted to be.

The year before we got married, husband and I bought a tiny 1930’s bungalow with a big backyard in Santa Monica. We affectionately referred to the house as “Little Yellow”, a nickname borne from a sickly sweet letter our realtor (grandly known as estate agents over here) encouraged us to write to the sellers telling them “how much we loved the house and knew it was for us from the moment we saw it” to accompany our well below asking price offer. It’s hard for me to imagine this going over so well after experiencing the brutality of the London property market, but being Southern California, it worked.

Life found a stride in the years at Little Yellow. I spent Saturday mornings shopping at the farmers’ market, then cooking a big lunch and eating it with husband out on the back deck in the sunshine. I had hit a professional stride as a project manager after a false start in finance, we had a moody cat and a loving dog, and all was well with the world. When my British husband first started floating the idea of moving back to England sometime after 9/11 and just over a year into our life in this new house, I staunchly resisted. I felt like he was pulling the rug out from under me and this cosy life, to the point where it became a regular topic in my weekly therapy sessions (everyone in L.A. has a therapist, really). My therapist’s advice was to call husband’s bluff.

So I did.

I told husband I’d move to London, but I wasn’t going to spend any money to get there. If he could find a job that paid to get us and our stuff across the Atlantic, I’d go. To the amazement of both of us, within a couple of months he did. Not only did he find a job, he seemed to have found the perfect job in the perfect industry paying the perfect money. Some bluff, I thought, and silently cursed the thousands spent on that therapist.

But as the time for the move approached it was, as my shrink predicted, husband who got cold feet. What the therapist failed to predict was that it was me who would become the cheerleader for the move abroad. My change of heart was facilitated by my irritation with my job at the time, more accurately my irritation with my idiotic boss, known in my household as “The Chadster”. He was from Texas and wore hair gel. Moving to London struck me as a convenient way to escape from this job I hadn’t been in for long without damaging my resumé (admitting defeat and finding a better job in L.A. somehow seemed less obvious).

Even stranger, I started to say things to husband like, “I’m 33, I have a lovely house in a lovely place, the best burrito in the world within walking distance, I own a Kitchenaid mixer, and I feel retired. Is this all there is?”

“Is this all there is?” That little question was quite popular with the thirty-somethings at the Santa Monica Zen Center where husband and I had spent the last few years as practitioners. (Shrinks and alternative religions are de riguer in L.A., I swear) And the sensai was consistent and clear, even a bit smug, in answering this question: “Yes, this is all there is.”

Which added even more fuel to my fire. If this is all there is then we might as well take the opportunity to do “this” in a country where flights to Europe are cheap and you get 23 vacation days standard per year. Whatever I said convinced us both. Six weeks later I walked into 334 square London feet that was now my home.

Cotswolds

A House with a Name

Posted on January 15, 2008

Our house came with a name, Drovers Cottage, spelled out in gold ye olde English script on a black plaque hanging above the front door. I had no idea what Drovers meant, but being American and a sucker for a house with a name, I loved it anyway.

Some Googling soon revealed a drover to be one who drives livestock long distances to market. I assumed this had something to do with the sheep trade that made this region rich, but the cottage post-dates the height of the town’s golden fleece fuelled glory. Further Googling revealed a connection that matches the age of the cottage. Welsh cattle drovers are documented to have used a route through our town in the nineteenth century. Opposite our cottage are Stable and Hayloft cottages where perhaps years ago these drovers housed their herds for the evening. Today I continue the tradition of immigrant labour, occasionally trying to hijack the wireless network at Hayloft.

Drovers cottage lies along a curving row of stone terraced houses that ends with a mill house and the stream. The town history reveals that this micro-neighborhood was once a dual mill, pre-Norman hamlet that was incorporated into the main town in the fourteenth century. Behind the mill is the most distinctive architectural feature of the town, the twelfth century church that came into its own with fifteenth century wool money. From this church springs a one hundred foot tower, crowned by a gleaming cockerel weathervane. The tower houses the eight bell carillon that rings to the tune of Hanover every hour through the day and the night (as we learned on our first overnight visit last year).

At the opposite end of our row of cottages is the entrance to the village green, now a small parking lot bordered by well-kept half-timbered buildings, including a butcher that sells the best sausages in the world, Eastleach spotless. To the left is a small lane that runs alongside the pub and opens onto the market square. The market still held here once a week is a legacy from the early thirteenth century when King Henry III granted the town a charter allowing it. In addition to the pub, the market square is bordered by a pharmacy, a post office, a green grocers/bakery, a wine shop/bar, and a takeaway Chinese restaurant, the latter two of which figured unreasonably in our decision to buy here.

One route out of the market square takes you past the war memorial and onto The West End. The higgedly piggedly row of Georgian and medieval houses removes any confusion with London’s synonymous theatre neighborhood. At the end of the End is the Roman road and the old prison, recently converted into a coffee shop and internet cafe. The alternate route out of the square takes you to the main A road, with newer developments and council housing on either side. Fields of sheep soften the intrusion of modernity into my rural fantasia. I’m in love.

Cotswolds

Fresh Snow

Posted on January 12, 2008

I am in the Cotswolds on my own. Husband has stayed behind in L.A. for work. Last night I took a train, then a perilous taxi ride down the Fosseway to our new cottage. There was fresh snow, the first of the season.

I spent the morning scoping out the best spots in town for mobile reception, which I’ve now determined are the edge of the field, although no further than the wooden shed known as the tennis club; the bench in the market square; and the big table at the front of the wine bar. It’s cold and my All Stars weren’t up to this snowy expedition. My week in L.A. has lulled me into a false belief in canvas as an all-season shoe choice.

Cotswolds

First Night in the Country

Posted on December 20, 2007

I am sitting on the 18:20 out of Paddington, packed with commuters heading home to Reading and Oxford. My destination, Kingham, is further west still. My hand luggage, two pillows sitting loose on my lap and a rolling suitcase stuffed with sheets and towels, jostles for space in the sea of laptop bags and briefcases. I am on my way to spend my first night in our new cottage in the Cotswolds, carrying a makeshift bed.

The only real explanation I have for why my husband and I have bought this cottage is to get a good night’s sleep. In London we have an upstairs neighbour in our Victorian conversion who keeps us up late at night, hosting what I presume is a midnight furniture rearranging league. The logical choice for spending the modest inheritance husband came into earlier this year would have been to upgrade our London flat to something larger and quieter. And I like to think husband and I are rational people. We have nine to five jobs and retirement funds and exercise regularly. But the truth is this is not the first time we’ve applied an overly complex solution to one of life’s problems — moving to England from L.A. because I didn’t like my boss springs to mind, but that’s a story for later. And so we chose instead a flooded, two hundred-year old cottage without central heating located a mere ninety miles from where we work. There was lots of time to change our mind while the place was drying out. But here I am, three stops away from crossing the threshold of our very own rural idyll.

The cottage is still rough around the edges. The living room floor is stripped back to cement — a result of the floods — and there are unwelcome remnants of the previous owner’s taste like lavender polyester floral curtains. But there is also a wood burning stove, an elm window seat, and church bells that chime each hour. In the morning, birds will join the bells.

I’ll be back on a train to Paddington in less than twelve hours. Husband and I leave for Florida for Christmas vacation tomorrow, and this brief visit to our new Cotswolds cottage was the only chance before we are back in January. It’s worth it already.

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2007

Posted on December 17, 2007

A magazine to which I subscribe has been running a “Life Takes Visa” ad with a “Things to do while you’re alive” list that annoys the hell out of me. It’s because the items on the list (sample: “Go to the NFL Pro Bowl”, “Spend a weekend in Las Vegas like a high roller”, “Test-drive a supercar”) describe a twit. And because it implies that I, as a member of this advertiser’s target demographic, am also a twit. However, I am not immune from my own life ambitions and at the age of approximately 12 decided I would like to visit all 7 continents before I die.

This year I came as close as I ever will to achieving that goal given no one really ever expects you to make it to Antarctica (unless global warming makes it a more hospitable tourist zone in my lifetime which I suppose is a possibility). I ticked six out of seven boxes with an October visit to Africa with my sister.

Like many things in my life it was more lucky than deliberate circumstance through which the trip materialized. My sister was working in the Middle East and Cairo is only a four hour flight from London. Voila! The pyramids and souks and mosques and the giant old curiosity shop that is the Cairo museum were ours to behold.

The best discovery of the year was closer to home—the Cotswolds, which on a good traffic day is 1.5 hours and another world away from our flat in London. We liked it so much that we decided to buy a cottage there, continuing our world domination in the postage stamp-size real estate market. Now husband is busy acquiring a tweed wardrobe and I am considering shooting lessons. (I’ve made friends with the only gays in the village and even they have their own shotguns.)

In the further spirit of lists, here are a few of my favorite things from the past year:
1. The Guiting Festival in the Cotswolds held on one of the few sunny days of the summer complete with hog roast and a ragtime band imported from Paris for the day.
2. Wine tasting in Dambach la Ville in Alsace with a nice lady who pretended she could understand my butchered French 101 and the workers who has just come in from the harvest with plastic bottles of cloudy wine nouveau.
3. Reading the book Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything by Elizabeth Gilbert.

By the way, I completed a draft of this “Christmas letter” on September 30th, before Cairo and the cottage were a reality. I did this in the woo woo spirit of unabashedly putting my wishes out to the universe, something I kind of learned in the book mentioned above. I wrote then: “I’ll come back to this before I send it out in December and let you know if I need to make any revisions.” And I’m happy to say that none are required.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Do write and tell me all your good bits (or even bad ones) too. Looking forward to seeing some of you soon in FL or LA.