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Cotswolds

Cotswolds

Back in the Wolds

Posted on April 21, 2011

Arrived back in the Cotswolds on Wednesday night for a few days of rural refreshment before a trip out to California then back again in time for the royal wedding. Enough royal wedding memorabilia to fill a small warehouse had been delivered in the post (tea towels for everyone!), including the Emma Bridgewater mug pictured from which I am currently drinking my morning coffee. I appreciate the way Ms. Bridgewater managed to make the helicopters (emblem of Will’s profession as a search and rescue helicopter pilot) look sort of like flowers if you squint, but it’s too bad the initials of the royal couple are the same as those used to indicate bathroom facilities in the UK.

Also awaiting me was the May issue of Cotswold Life magazine, a periodical in which I had pretty much lost interest when I was living here full-time. I preferred the New Yorker to say the monthly Cotswold Pub Dog column in which, yes, a local pub dog gets his own column in which to inform the public of his favourite pub snack, favourite spot in the bar, and favourite customer. But now that I am back living full-time in the big, bad urban-ness of Berlin, I sopped up Cotswold Life like it was some kind of life-prolonging tonic.

In typical idiosyncratic style, the opening article managed to both bemoan the cancellation for the second year in a row of Cheese Rolling down Cooper’s Hill, a nearly two-century old Cotswold tradition, and extol the virtues of smoking. The second article was a newish (well, new since I stopped reading regularly) column by a woman who calls herself Cotswold Mother. Very annoying since that is obviously the perfect spot for the American in the Cotswolds column. And then there was my favorite, the property pages, which reminded me how very rich this area is and how very rich I am not. The description in one ad for a manor and estate in nearby Withington included a minstrels’ gallery, bothy, and manège, none of which are architectural features with which I am familiar (although the first one sounds disturbingly, to an American, like a venue for a minstrel show). Like the old saying goes, if you have to ask you can’t afford it!

Cotswolds England

Royal Wedding Fever

Posted on April 16, 2011

I was nine years old when Prince Charles married Diana, and I still remember getting up early in the morning to watch the grainy broadcast in the family room of my suburban Southwest Florida home. I was glued to the television. I wanted to be Diana—not because she got to marry Charles but because she got to wear those acres of cream puff silk—or at the very least one of her bridesmaids, who I thought were the luckiest girls in the world. And now that their son, William, is getting married I am just as engrossed.

For one thing I now have a personal, if very tenuous, connection to the royal couple. It was at a wedding in the very church of our very Cotswold village where the couple appeared together in public for the first time in months last October. In the universe of royal watchers, this was a highly significant event and fueled speculation (correctly as it turns out) that the announcement of their engagement was imminent.

My own preparations for the royal wedding are well under way.  To start with, I will be leaving a business meeting in San Francisco a few hours early in order to make the 6:55PM flight that will get me back to the UK on time. (If anybody asks, I’m prepared to defend my decision with an explanation that, as a UK passport holder, I am virtually obligated to be present in the green and pleasant land to witness the big event.) I will be taking the day off so that we can watch the wedding from the wine bar, which will be hosting a prosecco and bunting studded big-screen viewing. The ladies of the surrounding villages have already agreed to arrive in hats, and my own, a hot pink number that last had an outing at Royal Ascot some years ago, will soon be retrieved from its pentagonal box in the far reaches of the wardrobe. I plan to pair it with my Target-Lily-Pulitzer-knock-off sundress and a pair of vintage pink crystal strawberry-shaped clip on earrings. I’m sure I’ll still be basking in the afterglow when I drink my coffee out of my Kate and William commemorative mug the next morning.

Cotswolds England

Drag for the Under-Eights

Posted on December 13, 2010

After more than five years in England, I was pretty sure I had exhausted the repertoire of traditional British experiences. I’ve attended the grand sporting triumvirate of Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon. I’ve wanged-the-wellie at a village fête. I’ve even eaten haggis to celebrate a Scottish poet I’ve never read. But until last Saturday night, I had never attended a panto.

British pantomime is a Christmas theatrical tradition that seems to follow the format of fairytale — Cinderella in our case — with a twist. The purpose of these twists, like the walk-on role of the gorilla, seem to be entirely to encourage audience participation; the form is to shout “it’s behind you,” when said gorilla appears. You can also sing along to the updated musical numbers. We had a lot of Take That, but the best was the rendition of Adam and the Ants’ Prince Charming. Then there is Buttons, the narrator/bumbling suitor of Cinders, who encourages participation from the moms, dads, and kids in attendance. Apparently Buttons wasn’t expecting our group of six, childless adults in the second row. I decided to help out the dads, who seemed the quietest of the constituencies.

Then of course there was the drag. The ugly stepsisters were expected. What wasn’t expected was that Prince Charming and his page would be played by women, which meant the central romance of the story was girl-on-girl. Suddenly the origins of stereotypical British sexual confusion became clear; this is, after all, the entertainment Britons are weaned on. I did seem to be the only one in the audience shocked by it though. The under-eights squealed with delight throughout.

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.

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!”

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.

Cotswolds

Stranded at the Drive In

Posted on July 12, 2010

Saturday night we celebrated the Fourth of July in the Cotswolds. There’s a lot of flexibility with dates for celebrating American holidays in England, so nobody seemed to mind we were a week late in honouring the independence of the rebel former colony. Some of the Brits even made an effort to get into the spirit of things. S. from the wine bar dressed in red, white, and blue and arrived with American wines, an Oregonian red and a Californian orange muscat for dessert. R. put on his best imitation of an American male, sporting khakis, an Izod, a baseball hat and sneakers. The man purse sort of threw off the look, but I appreciated the effort. L. arrived with a bouquet of the first of the season’s sweet peas from her garden and half a dozen eggs from her chickens. It wasn’t particularly American, but it was one of the nicer hostess gifts I have received.

I also did my best to create an authentic American ambiance. There was American flag bunting and a leather bound copy of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, provided courtesy of my father and his recent retirement sport of volunteering with the Tea Party. I filled the birdbath with ice, bottles of Bud and cans of Jack and Coke, a display that caused much amusement but remained largely untouched. There was potato salad, coleslaw, homemade guacamole, and burned hamburgers. I looked for hot dogs in the supermarket but the closest I could find were the kind of sausages Americans consider a breakfast item. (Those taste great in a hot dog bun too.) Oscar Mayer may have let me down, but Betty Crocker and Ben and Jerry were on hand to make dessert easier.

Husband did his part, transforming the back garden into a drive-in theater. There was no room for real cars but I did manage some blown up pictures of 1950s classics. When the light started to fade we indulged in the ultimate Americana, a screening of Grease. Even the Brits sang along.

Cotswolds

Seven Signs of May

Posted on May 15, 2010

It is mid-May and although the sun is refusing to acknowledge this, other elements of nature and man are playing along. On today’s bike ride, the last big training ride before the London to Paris charity venture, I catalogued these seven signs of May in the Cotswolds:

1. Horse chestnut petals floating in the birdbath.
2. French’s yellow mustard smears of rapeseed across the hillside landscape.
3. Cow parsley lining the lanes, innocuous but for the carpet of nettles at its base.
4. A gypsy encampment along a grassy verge, complete with painted wagon, solar panels, tinny sounding radio at full blast, lethargic dog, and bell-bottomed Cob horses grazing in a makeshift, roped off pasture.
5. Kamikaze insects, chartreuse pellets with translucent wings, turning my arms and legs into a human bug screen.
6. The arrival of the Italian tourists at Daylesford, wearing white jeans and “H” buckle Hermès belts and highlighted tips in their hair, and making the lunchtime viewing at the café as spectacular as the surrounding countryside — from which the Italians will stay safely ensconced in this pristine, retail-enabled, meta-Cotswolds. I can hardly blame them.
7. Swags of wisteria draped across stone cottages like bunting for a fête. It’s so picturesque I feel suspicious, like my senses have duped me into admiring a Thomas Kingkade painting.