Generally speaking, I have nothing but praise for First Lady Michelle Obama. She’s an accomplished career woman, advocate of physical fitness, and, miraculously, has managed to pull off bangs (that’s a fringe to my British readers) in middle age. As far as I can tell, her only fault was that memorable moment in 2009 when she dared to hug the Queen of England. Luckily for Mrs. Obama, and on behalf of all Americans in England, I set out to make good on her gaffe this past weekend when I had occasion to meet the Queen’s son, HRH The Prince of Wales.
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| Check out that footwork. Years of childhood ballet recitals finally pay off. |
Prince Charles was visiting our Cotswold town to attend a choral concert as part of Music in Country Churches, a charity of which he is a patron. That I was allowed to meet him, and thus rectify Mrs. O’s impropriety, was through the good fortune of our cherished friendship with Rupert and Ralph (of Americashire fame), who are residents of the former vicarage. During the concert interval, HRH would take refreshment in a marquee on the lawn of the vicarage. To thank the residents for their hospitality, Prince Charles would then take a moment to greet them all before returning to the church for the remainder of the concert. Knowing of my Anglophilia and having met HRH on a previous visit some years ago, Rupert and Ralph suggested we masquerade as residents of the vicarage and take their place in the receiving line. In exchange for their generosity, the only request was that I behave. And so I took to the internet to research royal etiquette and spent the day doing curtsy practice around our kitchen. When my turn came, I would be ready.
As HRH made his way down the receiving line, I readied myself for the big moment, shifting my weight to my right foot and purse into my left hand. With his pleasantries nearly completed with the woman next to me, I went in for my curtsy, adding a reverent little bow. Just at that moment, a chap from a few places earlier in the receiving line took advantage of the pause to attempt to re-engage HRH in a bit of light banter. I panicked. What was this over-eager buffoon doing distracting Prince Charles from the gracious sweep of my curtsy? I was already down. Should I come out of my pose and wait my turn or should I just stay in position? Erring on the side of caution—there would be no Michelle-esque breaches of etiquette on my watch—I chose to stay as I was, leaving HRH to greet my slightly overgrown roots when he did turn his attention to me.
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| In an apparent bid to make HRH feel better about his comb over, I show him my roots |
As patiently as he had waited for the last fellow to finish his bit of not-so-snappy repartee, HRH waited for me to complete my genuflection so that we could shake hands. Thankfully my husband managed to answer some questions on my behalf while I was busy bowing. I’m not sure I ever managed to form any words, but at least I have proof I managed to smile.
Oh shit, the future King of England is talking to me
While London lays claim to hosting the most Olympic Games of any city, its record pales in comparison to Chipping Campden. This quaint Gloucestershire town has been holding its own “Cotswold Olimpicks” each year since 1612, when the events included singlestick, wrestling, jumping in sacks, and shin-kicking. Farther south in Tetbury, competitors race uphill carrying woolsacks on their backs in the town’s most famous annual event, while, to the west in Gloucester, they race downhill in an attempt to catch a wheel of cheese.
These are but a few examples of the Cotswolds’ quirky collection of annual sporting events. Most are open to the public for free or a small fee and include a whole series of festivities in addition to the main event. Even if you don’t compete, any of the outings in our guide below would make an entertaining—and quintessentially Cotswoldian—addition to your itinerary.
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| An old woodcut of the Cotswold Games. Originally published in 1636 as the cover of the book Annalia Dubrensia. Image via Wikimedia Commons. |
Rubber Duck Racing
Shake off the excesses of Christmas Day with a brisk Boxing Day walk in the idyllic village of Bibury. Stop along the way to take in the annual rubber duck race on the lovely River Coln, which starts with decoys and ends with the yellow versions more commonly found in the bathtub. As a bonus, Bibury is the picturesque home to one of the most photographed scenes in all the Cotswolds, the National Trust’s Arlington Row.
Cheese Rolling
Cheese rolling on the steep slope of Cooper’s Hill is the Cotswoldian equivalent of Pamplona’s running of the bulls. Every year crowds gather to watch an intrepid group of racers chase an eight-pound wheel of Double Gloucester, which also happens to be the prize. The event caused quite the controversy last year when it carried on despite warnings from officials about health and safety concerns. Past cheese-rolling events took place on the late spring bank holiday Monday, but check this website for details of future events. One thing’s for sure: Double Gloucester has never been so dangerous.
Woolsack Races
The Cotswolds are known for their sheep-dotted hills, and each year in Tetbury, on the late spring bank holiday Monday, they celebrate the region’s wool heritage with woolsack races. The races, which consist of running up Gumstool Hill with a woolsack on your back, are thought to have originated as a way for young drovers to show off their strength to local lasses. These days, women can also demonstrate their prowess by competing, albeit carrying a slightly lighter load, at 35 pounds, than the men, who heft 60 pounds. Thankfully, there are pubs at either end of the racecourse to offer refreshment to both participants and spectators alike.
Olimpick Games
Wish you could relive the glory of the 2012 London Olympic Games every year? You’re in luck. Robert Dover’s Cotswold Olimpicks take place on Dover’s Hill in Chipping Campden every year on the Friday after the late spring bank holiday. There may not be a Danny Boyle-directed opening ceremony, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had, including music, races, and the traditional shin-kicking contest. The Olimpicks even have their own royalty in the form of a Scuttlebrook Queen, who is fêted the following day in a procession that includes fancy dress and Morris dancing.
River Football
Every August bank holiday Monday, the villagers of Bourton-on-the-Water play football in the River Windrush. You read that right: not on the banks of the River Windrush but actually in it. Goal posts are set up under the stone bridges, and visitors do their best not to get splashed while cheering on the teams from the surrounding green. Just down the road from the site of the match is Birdland Park & Gardens, a family-friendly venue where, dotting the river, you’ll find flamingos rather than football players.
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| Lawn stripes. Can it get anymore English? |
We’re back in the Cotswolds for a few weeks and we seem to have brought the weather with us from California. Sunday was one of those days when there is no better place to be in the world than England. A landscape lush with yellows of laburnum trees and rapeseed was offset by the contrast of a cloudless blue sky. By happy coincidence Stowell Park, the local big house and home of Lord and Lady Vestey, opened its gardens for a charity plant sale.
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| Peonies in the walled garden |
We picked up a few cuttings to keep the gnomes company in the stone trough of our courtyard garden, then spent another hour admiring the wildlife around the house. My husband’s aunt was with us and she declared the view from in front of the house—looking out over Yanworth and the Coln River—to be one of the finest in England. It’s the kind of scenery that never photographs as well as it looks to the naked eye so I took a shot of the house instead, which is none too shabby. These bulls were in the pasture and, on a day like Sunday, I’d be happy to live there, too.
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| Bucolic bliss incarnate |
Alongside my favorite pubs and long walks in the countryside, I’ve just added a new, rather incongruous activity to my to-do list for our upcoming May visit to the Cotswolds: see the new Banksy that appeared last week in Cheltenham. Painted around a phone box, it shows three men in trench coats and sunglasses, tapping the phone.
The location was presumably chosen because of its proximity to the UK’s Global Communications Headquarters, more commonly known as GCHQ and the rough British equivalent of America’s NSA. It’s an industry that’s not exactly an obvious fit with with the image of arcadian bliss commonly conjured, including on this blog, to describe the Cotswolds. Then again, that may be exactly why GCHQ, and Banksy, chose this spot.
April kicks off a verdant season of literary events in the Cotswolds:
The Chipping Norton Literary Festival takes place 24-27 April with a full calendar of author talks, readings, workshops and children’s events. On my wish list are appearances by Tim Harford, aka the Undercover Economist of the Financial Times, and Emma Bridgewater, doyenne of British pottery that graces country kitchens (and aspiring country kitchens) around the world.
It may technically be just outside the boundary of the Cotswolds, but I would be remiss not to mention Stratford-upon-Avon and the festivities there for Shakespeare’s 450th birthday celebration on the weekend of 26-27 April. The town’s Literary Festival runs in parallel through 4 May.
Back in the heart of the Cotswolds, festivities are underway to celebrate the centenary of Laurie Lee, author of Cider with Rosie. I’m most looking forward to the 26 June unveiling of 11 poetry posts inscribed with Lee’s poetry and positioned along walks throughout the Slad Valley.
As a makeshift Cotswoldian, my horse racing sympathies should naturally lie with that region’s biggest race of the year, the Cheltenham Gold Cup. But I’ve always been partial to the mayhem that is the Grand National, and not just because I’m married to a Liverpudlian. In honor of the race at Aintree tomorrow, I’m sharing an excerpt from my memoir, Americashire, that helps explain my kinship with it. For context, it takes place immediately after I have been treated for the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis and celebrates long shots of all kinds.
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, roughly the equivalent of NPR’s Morning Edition. 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.My first outing following the treatment was to the wine bar to watch my favorite horse race of the year, The Grand National. Miles was working behind the bar, and his reliable reply to my inquiry of how he was—“marvelous now that you are here”—made me feel particularly good that day. He just happens to have a bookkeeper who is also a bookmaker, and so the small group that had assembled was able to call in some bets before the race started. (Between this and the wine, free-range eggs, and homemade marmalade on offer, this place was getting dangerously close to supplying all my needs in life.) I broke my cardinal rule of choosing my bets based on horse’s names I like, instead opting for two tips I read in the appropriately named “How to Spend It” supplement in the weekend Financial Times. This is how I came to have Snowy Morning and Butler’s Cabin to win.
At 4:20 PM, the race got underway in a manner befitting of the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of horse racing. There are no starting stalls in The Grand National. Instead the forty competing horses just rushed the starting line like a school of crazed fish. There were two false starts before the official let them get under way on the four-and-a-half-mile course.
The other distinctive feature of The Grand National is the fences, thirty of them to be exact. They look like giant hedgerows, taller than the horses, some with ditches and water features and names like The Chair and Becher’s Brook. Surviving 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 sight with horses lolling on their backs and jockeys in a protective, head-clutching fetal position as they try to avoid impact from other horses flying over the fences behind them. A handful of jockeyless horses still make 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 my horses won, but it was no small feat that all three finished. Only seventeen of the forty did.
The finish line was not the only milestone reached that afternoon. After three straight weeks of being patient and solemn and an emotional rock, D finally relaxed enough to start introducing some humor into my recent health scare. He joked with Miles about how it would go down in our small rural community if he left me now that I was a “disabled lady.” Miles replied it would depend on how fast and with whom I then took up, a scenario that, judging by D’s expression, he had failed to consider. Both Miles and Roddy had been a comfort since the whole MS scare had begun. Roddy had confided his own daughter had MS, somewhat demystifying the disease in the process, and Miles had sprung into action, tapping into his network to get advice on the best neurologists in the region. And now, right on cue, Miles was also ready with a bit of deadpan humor.
The joking was a relief to me. Ever since the possibility of MS surfaced, I had been concerned about the impact to D’s depression. But instead of sinking him into one, the experience had the opposite effect. He had been calm and devoted throughout. Although he was dealing with the same terrifying thoughts about the potential impact of this disease that I was, it was as if his subconscious wouldn’t allow him to melt down. We were part of a team, and two of us couldn’t be on the bench at the same time.
I was feeling great but cautious, having made the mistake of spending an hour that morning on WebMD reading up on MS after showing such exquisite restraint with Internet research earlier in my treatment. It was filled with depressing articles called things like “MS and Your Career” or “MS and Intimacy.” The thing that got me most about my prognosis was the uncertainty. Even if I was diagnosed, it didn’t offer much more insight into what happened next. The symptoms I could experience ranged from a little muscle spasticity or feeling like my foot is asleep to loss of bladder control, sudden paralysis, or blindness at intervals of anything from weeks to months to years between episodes. I must have been at that stage in confronting bad news where you try to find meaning in things, because the parallels to the Grand National seemed obvious. First there was the rapid-fire process of elimination that got me to my initial diagnosis: voice-box damage, stroke, 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 one hundred to one, while another favorite, Hear the Echo, collapsed and died in the run in. I took 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.
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| My local beach in Santa Monica, CA, crowded even back in 1910 By Not given [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
The last place I lived in England before moving back to Los Angeles was a rural Cotswold village. Like many before me, I had retreated there from London to, well, retreat. I wanted to escape the crowds, a particularly noisy neighbor, and the general hassle of navigating big city life in an inclement climate. I moved to the Cotswolds to be left alone.
Of course as anyone who has ever lived in a village will tell you, a village is the worst place to move if you want to be left alone. I learned this early on when I made the mistake of assuming I could slip out undetected to the local shop early in the morning with unbrushed teeth and barely decent clothing. Our village shop was only about a block away from our cottage, just off the market square, so it seemed plausible I could make the trip incognito. I quickly learned I was wrong. You always see someone you know in the market square. But it didn’t take long for this experience to transform from a nuisance into one of my favorite rituals of the day. This, I realized,
was what being part of a community felt like.
I make my living in digital mapping where I hear stats every day about the urbanization of our world. As of 2010, more than half the world’s population live in urban areas. From Lagos to Los Angeles, mega cities are on the rise, with Shanghai leading the pack at a population of nearly 24 million. Much of our organizational brain space is committed to figuring out how to serve this demographic reality. What are the application mapping experiences these urbanites will need to navigate their uber-urban lives? But the longer I’ve been back in Los Angeles, the more convinced I am that we’re trying to solve the wrong problem. Having had the experience of village versus city in close succession, I’m fairly certain that cities just don’t work.
Despite the fact that my husband and I returned to Los Angeles with an inbuilt community of friends from the thirteen years we had previously lived there, our social life is a mere shadow of what we had in the Cotswolds. There evenings revolved around the local wine bar, located—you guessed it—right on the market square. On any given night of the week you could wander in, equally comfortably accompanied or alone, and be guaranteed a natter. We would see most of our circle of friends and a large circle of acquaintances, whether planned or not, once or twice a week. In Los Angeles, we see friends about once a quarter and usually only with considerable effort to arrange dates and times and sitters and reservations that suit all needs.
I suspect the feeling that everything is an awful lot more effort here stems from two things. First, people are more insular in L.A. Despite the relentless good weather, it can be hard and expensive to live here if, for instance, your commute and your school district are bad. Such factors conspire to make it particularly challenging for people to care much about what’s happening beyond their picket fence (in the unlikely event you can afford to live somewhere in LA with a picket fence). Second, the infrastructure just isn’t set up to make it easy for people to meet. In the 4,752 square mile expanse that comprises L.A. County, the old joke goes that you never go east or west of your side of the 405. It turns out there’s a good reason for this, as I learned on a recent Friday evening when I attempted to traverse 6.2 miles of L.A. road to see two of my oldest friends sing at a charity event in Hollywood. The journey took me an hour and 40 minutes. If it hadn’t been for a good cause, I would have been hard pressed to go.
The challenges don’t end with friends. Making good neighbors is harder in cities, too, thanks to the density of housing. The simple fact of proximity means you’re more likely to get on your neighbor’s nerves, and vice versa. And, of course, nobody talks to strangers. To interrupt the nose-in-phone reverie of a fellow diner at a café or restaurant for an impromptu chat is a sure way to be mistaken for a nut. Turns out the lack of a strong cellular signal in our Cotswold town had its advantages. People talked to each other.
Perhaps the grandest irony of all is the reason people often end up in cities: to find work. In a death spiral of chicken and egg logic, companies set up in cities to have access to talent, causing more people to move to cities, which in turn make those cities so unworkable that talent no longer wants to live there. My husband and I are not immune to this conundrum, and as we begin to plot our exit from the city for our middle-aged years, what we will do for income remains the question at the top of the list. Where we will move does not. Our Cotswold village beckons.
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| Horses in the Coln Valley, the Cotswolds |
Spring in the Cotswolds means horse racing. This is horse country and manicured horse farms dot the hillsides, discernible by jumping equipment that from a distance looks like giant candy-colored matchboxes and pickup sticks strewn about the fields. The racing event of the season is the Cheltenham Festival, for which half of Ireland, also horse mad, descends into Gloucestershire’s pubs and inns. Despite my enthusiasm for trying new country pursuits, I didn’t manage to book tickets to any of the Cheltenham Festival days. (We had already visited the Cheltenham racecourse for the Sunday flea market, a worthy but entirely different sort of sporting event.) Lots of administrative tasks—paying bills on time, booking train tickets, doing laundry—had gone out the window since buying Drovers Cottage. Chores used to get done on weekends, but now the pressure was on to enjoy ourselves come Saturday, especially if the weather was nice. The manufactured pressure to have a good time, formerly the reserve of real vacations, had with the purchase of a second home become a weekly event. In a fine example of first world problems, we were going to have a good time whether we liked it or not. And in this case, I was too busy having a good time to make time to purchase some tickets that would have allowed us to have, well, a good time.
And so we 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. Equally as interesting as the horses was the spectacle of the attendees. The place was swimming in gloriously vulgar hats that are as emblematic of English weddings and horse races as Hermès scarves are of French mademoiselles. I still treasure my own hot pink, pimp-feathered hat purchased for Royal Ascot the previous year. It may not be as versatile as a Hermès scarf, but the opportunities in life to wear vision-obstructing, fuchsia-colored feathers on your head are rare and must be taken. In the end, Denman crushed Kauto Star. It was a victory for brashness of every kind, including big hats.
Our only real horse race of the year took place at the village hall, and there had been much discussion beforehand about what this race would look like since it was being held in a village hall rather than at a racecourse. The consensus between D and Rupert and Ralph, who were going with us, was that it would be betting on prerecorded horse races shown on video monitors. We had gotten a race guide with our prepurchased tickets, each sponsored by local businesses so we could, for example, bet on Lamb Chop to place in the butcher’s race.
When we arrived at the hall there were betting booths with visored attendants and a bar set up in the corner. That’s where the similarities to a real racecourse ended. Attendees were seated around a giant central checkerboard set out in masking tape. Our assigned table was front and center, so we were on full display to our fellow villagers, like some kind of demented bridal party. Stroppy teenagers, three of each gender, jockeyed rocking-horse-sized wooden steeds painted in bright colors with mop-string hair. (Their parents definitely made them do it.) A tuxedoed MC called for volunteers to throw the giant fuzzy dice, the roll of which would determine the progress of the wooden horses up and back the checkerboard. D, no wallflower, was first to throw.
A childless couple and a gay couple shaken up with a few bottles of wine can be awfully catty. Well, awfully awful really. Between trips to the bar and the betting tables, Rupert and I spent much of our time comparing notes on the relative attractiveness of the teenage jockeys, neither gender spared. In retrospect, this was probably not a good way to endear ourselves to local parents. (We were sure we were whispering, but our perception could have been undermined by our blood-alcohol content.) Ralph then became obsessed with getting a turn at throwing the dice, an activity that had grown in popularity with each passing race. Elbowing small children aside, he finally managed to secure his position as thrower of the dice in the last race, following tense negotiations with the MC on a cigarette break between races five and six.
At the end of the evening, a young man in a wheelchair took the microphone to thank everyone. He was the beneficiary of the evening’s fundraising, which would go to buy a sports wheelchair he would use to play tennis. He was confident, gracious, and eloquent, so much so that we immediately sobered up in the full realization of what a generous community we’d so recklessly imposed ourselves on. This man didn’t need our charity. We were far more desperate specimens in need of our own fundraiser to pay for the many hours of psychotherapy we each required. Through it all our new neighbors sat on either side of us smiling patiently. We just weren’t sure if they would still be speaking to us in the morning.
When Jo Parfitt contacted me to ask if I would write a review of a book from her company, Summertime Publishing, it seemed like an obvious fit. Summertime publishes books “by people living abroad for people living abroad,” which has been the basis of most of this blog. It followed that Summertime books might be of interest to readers of this blog, too. But while Summertime’s list includes the kind of travel memoir I have written myself, I opted to review a how-to book co-authored by Jo herself.
A Career in Your Suitcase: A practical guide to creating meaningful work, anywhere spoke to me on two counts. First, since the publication of my own expat memoir, Americashire, last year, the question of whether or not I could turn writing from a vocation to a profession has lingered in the back of my mind. Add to that the fact that my British husband and I are actively trying to craft a life where we split our time between the U.S., our current home, and England, where we lived between 2005-2011, and it’s clear why I was eager to read A Career in Your Suitcase.
I generally read for pleasure, but A Career in Your Suitcase is a different kind of book. There’s no getting away from the fact that, despite the genial guides in the form of Jo and her co-author, Colleen Reichrath-Smith, this book is work, and I was going to get out of it what I put in. The authors ask you to ask tough questions of yourself and give honest answers throughout each of the book’s three sections, which cover finding your direction, finding your opportunity, and then putting it all together. One of my “aha!” moments came early in the book in a chapter devoted to finding your passion. Here Jo writes, “Sometimes it can be hard to separate the things we love to do and do well, from the thing we like to do less, but still do well…Sadly, the subjects we do best in are not always the one we love the most.” Here in two sentences was a state of the union on my career in project management.
There were moments in the book when I bristled at what seemed like outdated ideas for work for a trailing spouse—the politically correct term for which, I learned, is ‘accompanying partner’. Tupperware and Avon were mentioned with a complete lack of irony. (Such references also reinforced the idea that the guide is targeted at women, despite examples of men’s experiences as accompanying partners sprinkled throughout the book.) However, at the same time I could see that I was doing exactly what the authors warned against: being my own worst enemy, confined by my preconceived notions of what was appropriate work for me.
The most inspiring part of the book is that both these women are the proof in the pudding. Colleen moved to the Netherlands from Canada, learned Dutch and rebuilt her former career in her new language. Having lived as an expat in Singapore, Italy and Germany where my mastery of the native languages never went beyond rudimentary capabilities to be polite, order food, and ask directions, Colleen’s feat was astounding and inspiring to me. Jo was equally as impressive having essentially crafted for herself my dream job as a writer and publisher. The very fact that Jo reached out to me to review a book for her company was a prime example of the virtues of networking she extols in the book.
My only real criticism of the book is not a criticism at all, but rather a sort of astonishment at the sheer breadth of scope these two superwomen tackle. In particular, the final section covers topics like entrepreneurship in a single chapter when each easily warrant a book, or books, on their own. But as far as books go to help you clarify your requirements for work, open you up to possibilities and point you in the right direction for further enquiry, I can’t think of a more capable guide than A Career in Your Suitcase.