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California Cotswolds

Vive le Village

Posted on March 25, 2014
Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica crowded with bathers, ca.1910 (CHS-11211)
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.

Cotswolds

Horse Play: An Evening at the Races

Posted on March 11, 2014
Horses in the Coln Valley, the Cotswolds
The Cheltenham Festival, the biggest horse racing event—and arguably the biggest social event—of the Cotswold calendar, kicks off today. In its honor, I’m sharing an excerpt from a chapter of my Cotswold memoir, Americashire, about my slightly humbler experience of horse racing in 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.

Books

A Book Review for Citizens of the World: A Career in Your Suitcase

Posted on March 1, 2014

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.

Books Cotswolds

The Cotswold Report: from old favorites to new finds, the region’s best eating, drinking & shopping

Posted on January 11, 2014

I’ve just arrived back in Los Angeles after a month in the Cotswolds, where I was struck by the pleasingly consistent, almost defiant answer locals give when asked what’s new: NOTHING. While this may be true of some things—the wet weather and the stunning landscapes come to mind—I found the Wolds were awash with new and worthy finds: some just opened, some that have been around but were new to me. During our visit I also tried all our old standards, and I’m delighted to report they generally remain in good form. Still, with very few exceptions, the service in Cotswold restaurants remains too slow. Even if a kitchen is busy, much could be done to soothe tempers by providing prompt delivery of water, wine and bread, in that order. Sadly, even this seems to be too much to expect of many eateries whose prices demand that they should know better.

And now on to the good stuff. Starting in the north and working our way south, here’s my list of the best of the Cotswolds:

 

Moreton-in-Marsh
  • Greek Deli – Recently opened by hospitality veteran Ilias Karalivanos, this is a great spot for coffee and a light lunch of Greek classics. Don’t leave without some Greek wine and tasty tidbits from the deli case.
  • Christmas Birds & Books – In the same arcade as the Greek Deli, Richard Kemp recently opened Moreton’s only bookshop with the worthy sentiment: “Towns deserve bookshops. They are part of the community.” Amen.
Stow-on-the-Wold and nearby
  • The Porch House – This recently renovated pub/hotel is decorated with oversize bell jars housing antiquarian books, an interior design trick I’m planning to employ when I buy my Cotswold dream house. Snack on honeyed chili nuts and a pint of something local in
    the low-ceilinged pub, purportedly the oldest inn in England.
  • The Old Butchers – One of my old favorites for Sunday lunch has been reinvented as a charming wine and charcuterie bar. Coincidentally, we found its former manager at the delightful Royal Oak in Gretton, just outside of Winchombe, where we enjoyed a generous Sunday roast.
  •  Vintage and Paint – Just opposite The Old Butchers, this curiosity shop has everything from old Johnny Strong dolls to vintage movie lights. A refreshing take on the typical Cotswold antique shop.
  • The Borzoi Bookshop – On a tiny lane just off the market square sits a gem of an independent bookstore. Well stocked with regionally relevant books, it’s the perfect spot to pick up my favorite kind of souvenir.
  • The Coffee House – A couple doors down from the bookshop, their leather sofas are my favorite place to catch up on the papers.
  • Daylesford Organic (about 4 miles east of Stow) – We had our first Daylesford lunch in their Notting Hill branch, but the site just outside of Stow is the real deal. It’s easy to feel like a target market here (and hate yourself a little bit for it), but there’s no getting around the fact that the food is fantastic. The proprietress recently opened The Wild Rabbit in nearby Kingham, which is on my list for my next trip to England.
Beetroot soup at Daylesford
Cheltenham
  • No 131 – A welcome, terribly stylish hotel/restaurant/bar addition to the Promenade, and not just because the bartender knows how to make a stonking Old Fashioned.
Burford
  • Mad Hatter Bookshop – a bookstore and a hat shop, because, why not? Think of the English penchant for hats and its literary heritage, and it all starts to make more sense.
  • New Dragon Inn – When I need a break from the standard Cotswold menu of pies, sausage and mash, and fish cakes, I head for the New Dragon Inn. Served in the incongruous surroundings of a Grade I listed building (koi tank aside), I’m a fan of the crispy duck and Singapore noodles.
 
Northleach
  • The Black Cat – A new café in the old wool house. If this was Portland, it’d be loaded with hipsters and their Mac Books, but this is the Cotswolds which means you won’t struggle with getting a table or an overloaded wifi signal. Great breakfast baps, but the kitchen seem to struggle if an order includes more than two items.
  • The Wheatsheaf – Every time we return, the prices have nudged gently upward, but that’s done nothing to dampen business. Excellent fish dishes and the sirloin with peppercorn sauce always delivers. Service remains consistently inconsistent.
  • The Ox House Wine Company – My old favorite now serves tasty lunches. Menu changes on a weekly basis but may include anything from a lamb curry to fishcakes. There’s Viennoiserie in the mornings, plus standout bacon sandwiches. Of course the real attraction here is the wine, all hand selected from small producers. A delight whether you’re drinking in or taking a bottle or two away.
Relaxing in front of the fire at the Ox House

 

Barnsley
  • Barnsley House cinema nights are a favorite way to spend an evening in the Cotswolds. Relax with a glass of wine in the pink-loveseat splendor of it all. You don’t have to be a hotel guest to attend, although it’s a great place to stay if you’re in need of a bed.
  • The Village Pub – A firm old favorite. One of those rare places I would be happy ordering everything on the menu.
 
Tetbury
  • The Royal Oak – Recently refurbished, this pub with rooms is worth a visit and a good excuse to take in a scenic stretch of Tetbury that’s off the main drag.
  • Moloh – If you’re after some real royal memorabilia, skip Prince Charles’ Highgrove shop and head to Moloh, an upscale British women’s clothier favored by Kate Middleton. 
  • The Ormond – A pub and hotel that’s warm, friendly, and offers my personal favorite form of royal memorabilia: coronation chicken.
The Snooty Fox, Tetbury
Cotswolds

Fancy Dress

Posted on January 1, 2014

The British have quite a thing for fancy dress, or costumes in Ameri-speak, which manifested in two ways this past week. First, we went to a traditional Christmas panto, Aladdin, at the Everyman Theater in Cheltenham. If you’ve never been to a panto, it’s more or less a fairy tale livened up by pop music (a Freddie Mercury medley in this case) and both men and women in drag. The male and female romantic leads are played by women, while the role of Widow Twankey—a character that always appears, regardless of the fairytale—goes to a man that is purposely at no risk of being mistaken for a woman.

For reasons still unknown to me, this version of Aladdin was set in “Old Peking”

Our second encounter with fancy dress was at last evening’s New Year’s Eve party. (Unlike Americans, the British see no reason to limit costume parties to Halloween.) Husband and I went, respectively, as Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows and the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. I even managed to bag first prize, a bottle of champagne we put to good use to ring in the new year.

Our efforts at bringing two classic children’s books to life

Happy New Year to you and yours! May 2014 bring you health, wealth, and a plethora of opportunities for fancy dress.

Cotswolds

A Day Out in Tetbury

Posted on December 31, 2013

Yesterday we had a day out in Tetbury, a lovely Cotswold market town that, among other things, is home to Prince Charles’ Highgrove Estate. We didn’t run into any royals—other than the postcard of Prince George that I bought for my six-year old niece, a royal enthusiast—but we did catch the Duke of Beaufort’s Hunt right before it set out. We also tried two new-to-us places, both of which I recommend: The Royal Oak Tetbury, where we stopped for coffee, and The Ormond for lunch. There was also time to drop off a copy of Americashire at the Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, whose charming motto comes courtesy of Van Gogh: “Bookshops aren’t hares, and there’s no hurry.”

 

Christmas Letters England

Letter from the Lake District: Christmas 2013

Posted on December 22, 2013
The Christmas lights on Regent Street in London

I’m writing this year’s Christmas letter in front of a crackling fire in the resident’s lounge of possibly the best pub in Britain, the Britannia Inn in Elterwater, Cumbria. Our trip to England has so far been an embarrassment of rural idyll riches, having started in the Cotswolds where, for the first two weeks, we requisitioned the flat of our dear friends (a.k.a., Rupert and Ralph) and finished out the remaining work weeks of the year. We’ve now embarked on the northern leg of our journey to spend Christmas and Boxing Day with husband’s family, starting with an interlude in the Lake District.

The Britannia Inn, Elterwater, where we nearly divorced while arguing over the answer to Maggie Smith’s Oscar winning film during the pub quiz

Between all the bucolic bliss, we managed to spend 2 nights at the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill, which I highly recommend if you want to feel like you’re in a Richard Curtis film. The room featured a freestanding bath tub with a view of a private garden (yes, just like the one Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant broke into in that film). Breakfast in the sitting room consisted of the most beautiful heap of scrambled eggs sitting atop a piece of toast with the crusts trimmed off. It arrived, of course, beneath a silver dome. All this pampering didn’t come without its price, but seeing as we were celebrating husband’s 39th birthday for the tenth time, it seemed apropos.

Favorite breakfast ever. Certain it was made by Mary Poppins.

We also managed to indulge in a little shopping, spurred on by the discovery of the charming shop, Stumper & Fielding on the Portobello Road. On a stretch of London that’s been blighted by tat, Stumper & Fielding is a bastion of English sartorial standards, from Tootal scarves to Loakes brogues. Husband got so carried away he purchased a pair of booties of the latter make in a size too big, a fact he failed to notice until he had marched the length of Kengsington Gardens, Hyde Park and Mayfair to deposit ourselves at the Duke of York’s theater for an evening of Jeeves & Wooster (splendid, go see it if you’re in London). Blistered and bruised, he hobbled into Stumper & Fielding in the morning to find that, amazingly, for only a pittance to cover the re-soling, they were willing to exchange the shoes. What could I do but buy myself a velvet-collared Harris Tweed blazer to express my gratitude at their professionalism?

Husband, crippled by his new shoes, leans on his favorite shop

Here I will pause for a moment to acknowledge my self-consciousness at the outpouring of wonderful life-ness I have just directed you to read. I fear you may be finding this year’s Christmas letter devoid of the gleeful Schadenfreude you had hoped for, and I wish to provide comfort. You see, this is a Christmas round-up letter, which means I am practically legally obligated to only write about pleasant events. Rest assured that I, in fact, pay very good money to a very nice lady each week to divulge my life’s tribulations. I think we can all agree that’s the appropriate place for such strife.

I did toy briefly with the idea of telling you about my challenges earlier this year of finding an MS medication that didn’t involve a needle and feeling like I had the flu on a weekly basis. But then I was reminded of the dreaded part of my weekly telephone conversation with my mother in which she debriefs me on the maladies of people I last saw thirty years ago. Terribly dull stuff, so, suffice it to say, I have settled on a twice-daily pill that also happens to be used industrially to make foods taste sour. Its worst side effect is to occasionally give me ruddy cheeks. If it makes you feel better, you can also use the MS narrative to justify the indulgence described above—you know, ‘life’s short, live it while you have your health’ kind of stuff. But, let’s face it, we both know I was a skilled indulger before the arrival of that dratted disease.

You may also take some comfort in the fact that my first book, Americashire, failed to, ahem, crack any bestseller lists. Somehow, despite this, it was the highlight of my year: a fantastic education marked by some terrific moments. These include meeting my fellow inaugural She Writes Press authors at our joint event in Berkeley in May and collecting the Indie Reader Discovery Award for Travel Writing at Book Expo America in New York in June. Husband was a supportive presence at both, and a big hit with the literary ladies. I also have a debt of gratitude to all of you who so patiently put up with endless self-promoting tweets and Facebook posts. Some of you were even so kind as to buy the thing and write nice stuff on Amazon and Goodreads. Thank you. You can’t imagine how much your actions mean.

Me at Book Expo America, prouder than I have any right to be

Back in California there were highlights, too, including our BYO Zen sitting group, seeing husband’s two idols, Shatner and McCartney, on stage together in a benefit for the Los Angeles Shakespeare Center, and our discovery of Ojai, or, as we like to call it, the Cotswolds of California (which I wrote about here). And so, friends, I think this place of gratitude for the year is a good one from which to take my leave. A pint and a packet of Scampi Fries await me in the pub. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Cotswolds

Return to Americashire

Posted on December 8, 2013

Our month-long return to the Cotswolds is off to a fine start. We took the long way here from Los Angeles, stopping for a night and day in Boston before continuing on to Heathrow last night. Our goal was to break the journey into two, five-ish hour flights instead of one epic flight, but the stop in Boston also served as a cultural transition. New England, with her crisp air and preppy-fied populace, prepared us well for Ye Olde England.

Despite the air traffic control tumult of yesterday, our flight touched down on-time and before long we were whizzing along the M4 in our festive rental car, a red Fiat Cinquecento. It’s merry but I’m not sure how she’ll handle ice or snow, so just as well it’s still relatively mild out. We took advantage of the weather to walk the four miles to the pub for a Sunday roast. The service was predictably uneven, but, on the first day back in town, this still seems endearing. (My guess is I’ll be ranting about English customer service well before the end of the month.) Roast pork and potatoes with a Yorkshire pudding also helped dispel any budding disgruntlement.

The only remaining goal of the day is to make it to 8pm before the jet lag wins. Next up is a quick jaunt to Berlin this week before returning to the Cotswolds. London and the Lake District also feature later on the agenda. For now, I’m so happy to be back and looking forward to sharing the rest of the adventure here.

Books California

Books Signing at Bank of Books, Ventura, CA

Posted on November 30, 2013

It’ small business Saturday, and I’ll be doing my part by signing copies of Americashire at a lovely indie book store, Bank of Books between 1-3PM. As an added  bonus, it’s on an honest-to-goodness main street chock full of other kinds of lovely indie stores. Come join me if you’re in the area!

Bank of Books
748 E. Main St.
Ventura, CA 93001