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Cotswolds

Life in the Variable Speed Lane

Posted on August 18, 2009

The back page of the Weekend FT’s Life & Arts sections hosts two columns of which I am a regular reader, Tyler Brûlé’s The Fast Lane and Harry Eyres’ The Slow Lane. Tyler is forever jetting off in first class to his Swedish holiday home or Tokyo or Mumbai, full of tips on the best airlines and luggage and local retail offerings. Harry is forever reading Aristotle or watching birds or listening to The Proms. Given my recent embrace of the rural life, I feel I should have more of a natural affinity for The Slow Lane. But the truth is that I am just a little bedazzled by the life of Tyler. I always read The Fast Lane first, and not just because it’s at the top of the page.

Real life of late has been a mix of both the fast lane and the slow lane. At 5pm last Thursday, the news broke that I needed to be in Boston in time for Monday morning meetings. Thanks to some surreptitious IMing with the all-knowing, all-powerful administrative assistant Iva during a four hour meeting on Friday afternoon, flights, rental car, and hotel were secured before I left the Hampshire office at 5pm. I was heading back to Gloucestershire to meet out of town guests at the wine bar at 7pm, and while I drove I perused my mental to do list and wondered how I was going to accomplish it between now and when I had to leave for Heathrow on Sunday afternoon: clean bathroom before guests arrive (a feat which would require time travel); find American adaptor for laptop and mobile phone charging; buy toothpaste, hand lotion, tampax, and shaving cream (I had already determined all food related sustenance for husband and guests would have to be provided by the fine pubs and inns of our greater local area); pay buildings insurance; transfer money to unused bank account from which husband had randomly chosen to write a check for the refrigerator repair; do laundry; enter passport details and check-in online. Thanks to the mini grocery stores that grace the UK’s motorway rest stops, I had acquired all absent toiletries before I hit the wine bar. (Is it wrong that I have become so reliant on motorway rest stop grocery shopping that I now have favorites, namely the Marks & Spencer Food at the services just after Reading on the M4 and the Waitrose just after the Oxford exit on the M40?) I did not, however, manage to remember the U.S. adaptor and therefore purchased yet another one after clearing security at Heathrow. I am now quite possibly in possession of the world’s largest adaptor collection, of which I was reminded as I schlepped over to the B Gates of Terminal 5 and wondered what was poking me in the leg. It was in fact the American adaptor I bought last time I “forgot” one, stashed safely in the side pocket of my carry-on bag so I wouldn’t ever “forget” it again.

In contrast, life in Gloucestershire has been quite literally in the slow lane. It’s harvest time and tractors are using the roads to haul crops of corn and oil rapeseed, which serves as an effective yet no doubt infuriating speed deterrent for the hordes of BMW and Range Rover drivers who usually race along the country roads with the urgency of an ambulance. I do not fall into this category (and not just because I drive a Prius), despite the fact that I am perpetually running late. My commute time is my think time, and I think better at an amble anyway. Just on the outskirts of town a corn dryer rumbles away, producing a pleasant backdrop of white noise for all my musing. The barley and wheat will keep me company in the fields for another week or so depending on the weather (there are high hopes for a dry harvest after a wet one last year), their stalks bleached the exact colour of the dry stone walls that enclose them. Sunday I took the slow way out of town en route to Heathrow, past a herd of cows recently migrated to the field just behind Ethel and George, which includes a handful of lovely mushroom coloured calves and a sole ginger coloured heifer, past the Coln River and the long, narrow sheep pasture just outside of Coln Rogers, out Winson with it’s handsome field of racehorses and the stud farm, to the intersection just before Fosse Cross, marked by the tin-roofed barn. It took me an extra fifteen minutes, but sitting on the taxiway reading Harry Eyres I was reminded that it was worth the time.

It is with no small displeasure that I find myself on the cusp of a metaphor about my life involving the M25, the London ring road that employs a variable speed limit broadcast over digital signposts to keep traffic moving. It is, after all, a distinctly unglamourous comparison to make. And yet it is apt. It would be untrue to say I didn’t derive a sort of buzzy pleasure from the stress of a short notice business trip, as untrue as saying I didn’t enjoy the contemplation of a long Cotswold ramble, or naming my favorite trees Ethel and George, or learning the name of a bird or a flower that graces the hedgerows. Life works best for me at a variable speed; it’s how I keep my mental traffic moving.

Cotswolds

Lurching Towards Mesey Hampton

Posted on August 4, 2009

We spent Sunday afternoon at a dog show, the V.W.H. Hunt Farmers & Supporters Club Terrier and Lurcher Show, at the suggestion of the local Bon Vivant who happens to be one of the aforementioned official “supporters.” Although the show would feature a dog agility competition, the first challenge of the day was to our mental agility and required that we locate the village where the show was being held, Mesey Hampton. This was not to be confused with the village of Maiseyhampton less than a mile to the north. After only one argument and a harrowing u-turn on a narrow road, husband and I found the V.W.H. Kennels.

My rural education resumed with haste. The grounds had two rings roped off, one for the Terrier classes (Jack Russell, Border Terrier, Lakeland/Fell, and Patterdale type) and one for the Lurcher classes. Much to my juvenile delight, the latter included competitions for both “rough” bitches and “smooth” bitches. Alas there were no rap video hos, only lovely greyhound-ish looking ladies. Bon Vivant Jr. ignored my guffawing and patiently explained the general principles of the proceedings. This was a dog show for country people and their working dogs. The terriers would be judged on the features that made them useful for hunting, like the ability to stick their snout down a hole, rather than the poncey stuff reserved for the world of pedigree shows. This was the anti-Crufts or, if you’ve seen the film Best in Show, the “anti-Best in Show” show. The atmosphere was relaxed, without poodles or bows or doggie blow dryers, and blissfully free of women in fringed costumes dancing with their dogs to “Achy Breaky Heart.”

The highlight of the day was when Bon Vivant Jr.’s girlfriend lent husband her smiley dog, Gypsy, a half-Collie, half-Jack Russell mix, for a spin around the agility course. Husband looked like a half-mad, oversized leprechaun, mouth pursed into an “O” and eyes agog as he coached Gypsy to jump and weave in a perky voice while running behind her in a dainty, trotting gait. Luckily Gypsy was trained in agility and completed the course with ease while more or less ignoring the strange man distracting her. At least husband didn’t climb through the tunnel as the lady before him did in an attempt to get her dog to follow (she failed). To the shock of almost everyone, husband managed to bag a second place time with Gypsy’s champion moves. He was awarded a blue rosette, which now hangs proudly in the kitchen, and Gypsy got a bag of treats.

Cotswolds

The Cotswold Show

Posted on July 6, 2009

Over the weekend we attended the granddaddy of village fetes, the Cotswold Show. It was awfully sporting of Lord Apsley to throw such a big party for the Fourth of July at his ancestral seat of Cirencester Park. It reminded me of the graceful way Britain handled a more recent defeat at the hands of America, Andy Murray’s semi-final loss to Andy Roddick on Friday night at Wimbledon.

The show thoughtfully placed a dog scurry event right next to the port-a-loos at the entrance. This gave husband something to pass the time while he waited for me to stand in the inevitably much longer ladies’ line (some things never change). Next up were a multitude of opportunities for a grown man to reclaim his lost boyhood. After posing for pictures next to the steam trains on display, husband took a crash course in archery. We made a mental note to return for the ferret races at 2:30pm and headed off in search of lunch.

Hamburgers were washed down with a beer—Cotswold Summer Lager for me, Doom Bar for husband—while a middle-aged band serenaded us with Lynyrd Skynard with a British accent. (Skynard is apparently as obligatory for British as American county fairs.) Overhead a group of parachutists floated into the main display area. Earlier there had been Evil Knievel-esque motorcycle jumps here, and later the local hunt would show off their Modern English hounds before a man with a Cockney accent and a medieval outfit did a falconry display.

I’m sure Patricia Marx could fill an entire On and Off the Avenue with the shopping on offer at the show. We got so distracted with the coracles, a traditional Welsh fishing boat, and rare breed livestock that we forgot about the ferret races. Oh how any one of these retail outlets would liven up the Pottery Barn/Banana Republic tedium of the average shopping mall (fancy an Old Spot piglet with your Martin stretch cotton trouser?). I settled for a tweed flat cap from Rydale, which was both more portable and affordable at £8.99.

We ended the afternoon at the fun fair. Husband had earlier promised to take me on a spin on the diminutive ferris wheel. Much to the amusement of the two ten-year old girls in line in front of us, he bailed just before it was our turn to ride. The ten-year-olds obligingly let me share their compartment with them. As we surveyed the grounds from atop the wheel, they briefed me on the ferris wheel scene in Southern England. Apparently the ride at Gloucester Quay is not to be missed.

Cotswolds

Notes on a Summer Landscape

Posted on July 3, 2009

The acid yellow of oil of rapeseed has long ago given way to chunky sage green foliage, threaded through with papery orange-red poppies. Deep green seas of wheat have faded to sage green too. Some are already in the throes of becoming the wheat we know, germs bleached and wispy and standing on end like a blond shot through with static electricity. Fuchsia thistles spike the hedgerows and plumes of cow parsley persist, party favors of spring.

Cotswolds

Chuck-the-Wellie

Posted on June 21, 2009

The Great British Summer is officially here. Thousands marked the summer solstice by watching the sun rise at Stonehenge, but I took my cue from a more traditional kick-off to the summer calendar: Royal Ascot. While I did not attend this year, I did catch a glimpse on television and was struck by just how anachronous the whole spectacle appeared. A BBC commentator was interviewing the aged couple who owned the horse that had just won a race. He was stiff in his stove top hat and blunt cut morning coat, showing no hint of pleasure at his victory. She was excessively coordinated: shoes, bag, dress, jacket, and lampshade hat all in shades of black and white. Both were completely lacking in the sartorial ease that characterizes our fashionable neighbors across the channel. I daresay the addiction to matching coordinates exhibited by m’lady would be enough to make mademoiselle strangle herself with her Hermès scarf or gouge her eyes out with her Chanel ballerina flats.

Still I am smitten with all forms of British tradition, and yesterday we attended a more casual yet equally important event in the summer social calendar: the first fête of the season. We cycled over to Chedworth where the weather behaved as expected—wind, drizzle, sun, and clouds in alternating cycles of approximately fifteen minutes each—while the whole village defiantly carried on with the requisite fête activities of jumble sale, Tombola, barbecue, dog show, and chuck-the-wellie competition, with tea and cakes served in the village hall. There will be one of these every weekend day in a village somewhere in the Cotswolds from now until the end of August, including our own Charter Fair next Saturday. We are, somewhat distressingly for my romantic fantasy of my quaint rural life, a town rather than a village, owing to a charter granted by King Henry III in 1227 giving us rights to hold both a weekly market and an annual fair. Thus we have a fair rather than a fête.

As such, we have to make a bit more of an effort. Rustic amusements such as chuck-the-wellie would just seem out of place amongst the grandeur of a climbing wall and vintage chair-o-plane rides and, gasp, a fire engine. (The fire engine appears twice on the official programme of events. First, we pause for its entrance, then the band plays a bit more, and then, we have a designated time slot to admire it.) Faced with such excitement the wine bar has chosen to shut its doors for the day. The memories of last year’s deluge of punters asking to use their facilities and the unseemly smells wafting in from the cricket team’s barbecue stand were just too much.

Personally, I think they’re overreacting. It reminds me of the response of Notting Hill’s posher residents to that other great British summer event, the Notting Hill Carnival. Many West London home owners board up their stucco terraces and flee the city while the rest of London floods in for three days of food, floats, and Red Stripe induced fights. More than a few of these Notting Hill refugees will be heading for the retreat of their weekend homes in the Cotswolds where they may happen upon the quaint charms of a local fête. Should they arrive at our Charter Fair next weekend they will no doubt be disappointed to find such charms are not to be enjoyed over a glass of rosé .

Cotswolds

Tramp’s Pillow

Posted on June 2, 2009

Last weekend we went to lunch hosted by the local bon vivant, M. The blue and white check cloth-covered table was set out in the front garden against the wisteria draped stone of the house. Rambling flowers to the left belied the hours of care that had gone into them. To the right was the chicken coop that has supplied us many breakfasts and a kitchen garden with neat rows of lettuces and stick tepees awaiting their runner bean linings.

The weather was behaving impeccably and it was all straw hats and sunglasses and rosé served from an earthenware pitcher. A compliment on the jug prompted M. to confess the decanting was being done to conceal that the rosé was coming from a box in the fridge. This led to a discussion on the virtues of boxed wine, a subject about which I thoughtI knew something given I had a box o’Franzia pink in residence in my closet for all four years of college. There was, however, a piece of trivia that was new to even me. The bladder in a wine box is indestructible and therefore makes a handy pillow—a tramp’s pillow—in a pinch. M. always keeps one in Châteaux Peugeot (a.k.a. his white van) in case of (presumably wine-induced) emergency camping requirements. All this musing on boxes of wine and tramps sent M. into a tailspin of melancholy. His phone had been cut off a week ago because he hadn’t paid the bill. Head in hands, he informed us that this was not where he hoped to be at the age of fifty-six.

M’s purported dissatisfaction with his life got me thinking about the nature of happiness. I didn’t really believe he was unhappy most of the time, but rather pesky intrusions like an overdue phone bill were conspiring to make him believe he was depressed. It reminded me of the nocebo effect, which works like the opposite of the placebo effect, producing symptoms by creating negative expectations. Experts blame the proliferation of public health warnings and medical information on the web. I long ago imposed a self ban on Googling anything MS related, but ever since I was nominated for membership in the chronic illness sufferers club I’ve noticed MS all around me. It’s like when you’re pregnant or engaged and it suddenly seems like everyone else is also having a baby or getting married. Just this morning there was a news story about a woman with MS who has become a member of an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. After I hear something like this I invariably start to imagine symptoms. I have a heightened awareness of my middle spine or a tingling in my knee. It takes a few minutes to realize that’s just the belt on my wrap dress cinched a little too tight or to remember I walked through a patch of nettles earlier in the afternoon.

M.’s melancholy passed before we finished the roast chicken. By the time we were on the cheese he was busy discussing the 150+ strong guest list for his upcoming fifty-seventh birthday party which he plans to celebrate with Heinz 57 themed catering—beans on toast and boxed wine for everyone. I’ve already thought of the perfect birthday present for him: the biggest, fluffiest goose down pillow I can find.

Cotswolds

Ethel and George

Posted on May 31, 2009

I am an equal opportunity anthropomorphizer. Like most transplanted urbanites my targets include the predictable assortment of cows, horses, chickens, sheep, and dogs that litter my jogging route. But lately two trees have become the objects of my affection. They grace the crest of the hill as you come out of the village, standing close enough to each other to indicate coupledom, far enough apart to indicate it’s been a long marriage. I’ve even named them: Ethel and George.

I’ve been watching Ethel and George with some concern for the past couple of months. While the rest of the countryside was waking up in a spasm of green, Ethel and George stayed resolutely brown and brittle looking. I even worried they may be dead. Then, in the last week, great poofs of green sprung up on both of them, sticking every which way like a home perm gone wrong.

Things have gone less well for my other animal friends. Last week a fox got twenty of the hens that share a field with the chestnut coloured horse. I was worried the horse was feeling lonely without them (nevermind my depression over the egg drought) so I stopped and rubbed his nose for a little longer than usual today. I was also disappointed to find that the herd of dark chocolate cattle with yellow tag earrings that had been calling the field next door home for the past month have moved on without so much as a goodbye. The field has been mowed short and in place of the cows there are round, plastic covered bales of hay. Despite my success with Ethel and George I think even I might have trouble crafting an emotional life for hay.

Cotswolds

Revenge in Bloom

Posted on May 28, 2009

Husband and I have achieved another milestone in rural village life: we’ve made our first enemy. It happened on the cricket pitch, where we were watching our local team take on a village from Oxfordshire.

The sum total of my knowledge of cricket is that it bears a fleeting resemblance to baseball—not a remark that goes over well with cricket fans —and it sometimes takes days to finish a match. Also, the players wear cabled cream sweaters with their team colours around the neckline. As it happens our village team shares the green and gold colours of my high school mascot, The Mighty Green Wave. This and the fact that the sun was making its first extended appearance of the spring was all the reason I needed to stake my sling-back deck chair on the sidelines for the afternoon. It was a busy few hours, munching on strawberries washed down with rosé and catching up on all the latest gossip with R&R, who had joined us. Finally, though, our chatter wore down one of the more keen spectators. There was some pointing and whispering before an acquaintance of ours was dispatched as the diplomatic envoy on behalf of the grumpy chap in the maroon cardigan to ask us to keep it down. It was 6pm, we were four hours into the match, and with no end in sight we decided it best that we pack up and head for the wine bar to finish the evening.

I thought nothing of the incident until a few weeks later. Husband and I had volunteered in response to an email asking if any locals were interested in helping maintain the various flower tubs and baskets that dot the town as part of the Britain in Bloom competition, but I had yet to hear anything back. It turns out the man in the maroon cardigan is also in charge of the town flower pots. We were being snubbed, and I was outraged.

For the next week I thought long and hard about what to do with all my pent up community spirit that had been deprived of its natural geranium planting outlet. I briefly considered joining the WI—the Women’s Institute, the British equivalent of the Junior League—but decided I was being a bit rash. In the end I opted for my own private town beautification scheme in the form of two new hanging baskets of purple petunias to cheer up our little lane, which happens to be the only route to the cricket pitch. My cardigan-ed nemesis will have to walk right by them when he makes his way to the match next Saturday.

Cotswolds

Black Country Faggots

Posted on May 20, 2009

An unwitting and/or politically correct American could be forgiven for gasping aloud upon entering my local butcher shop. There on the counter a handsome wicker basket brimming with Black Country Pork Scratchin’s sits by the cash register, inviting you to indulge in an impulse purchase. In the case below faggots are also on offer. But this is not the most bigoted butcher shop in England. The Black Country is an area in the British Midlands named for its history of iron forging and coal-related industry. That it happens to have a brand association with fried lard and is credited with the invention of faggots—meatballs made of pig heart, liver, and belly fat—is just a coincidence.

R. the barman tells me these faggots are exceptional. (He also favors the deviled kidneys at the Wheatsheaf Inn.) Having a weakness for chicken liver mousse and sweetbreads myself, I suspect I too would find the faggots exceptional and plan to try them soon. The pork scratchin’s are less tempting. As much as I am a fan of lard, there is something just a little too disconcerting about the wild-eyed, red pig grinning at me from the label.

Even more upsetting is the fact that Black Country Pork Scratchin’s seem to be making in-roads at local pubs as the down-market bar snack of choice, edging out my two traditional favorites in this category, Scampi Fries and Cheese Flavoured Moments. These are without doubt the most processed food stuffs ever to have passed my lips, but there is something undeniably British and wonderful about a shrimp flavored cereal snack. Regardless, the Brits seem to have fallen out of love with this particular form of poison, leaving me with only crisped up pig fat or posh potato chips to choose from.

Like Black Country Pork Scratchin’s, the upscale potato chips make a virtue of their provenance. The primary color, block print design of Burt’s Hand Fried tells you they come from Devon, while Tyrrell’s of Herefordshire feature black and white pictures to make you feel like what you are eating is somehow old fashioned and wholesome. Scampi Fries and Cheese Flavoured Moments are more vague. Their packaging is similar to eachother, with one showing a picture of a boat through a window, the other a cow. Much like the snack, the taste of real seafood or real cheese is evoked rather than delivered. Call me an overly sensitive American, but I think there’s a lesson in subtlety here for the Black Country Pork Scratchin’s marketing department.

Cotswolds

Requiem for Colour

Posted on May 8, 2009

Desperate to escape the bleak winter months, the English have adopted a notional date of March the first as the start of spring. Astronomers argue for the vernal equinox, around the twentieth of March. But spring in the Costwolds didn’t happen until a Thursday in the middle of April, the day when green finally tipped the balance. I drove into work through a dun coloured landscape and drove back with an escort of mint green, deep-pile carpet lining the country lanes. The grass rose into pea soup hedgerows then the brown lattice work of trees still bare except for pinched-face buds. Over the next two weeks these unwound into a canopy of chartreuse lace, accompanied by sprouting fields and set off by dark evergreens. If you looked closely there were bluebells too. They are not blue, but neither are they lavender or lilac or violet. They are plain purple, the one you get in the Crayola eight-pack.

Rapeseed happened next. Nothing changes the landscape of the Cotswolds more drastically or quickly than the en masse bloom of this flower. It is the colour of Ronald McDonald’s pants or the cheap mustard you get in a plastic packet with your corndog at the beach; it is not a colour that should occur in nature and yet it does. Lacking the good taste daffodils demonstrate by sprouting up in modest clumps, rapeseed appears in swathes that render the hills a crude patchwork of yellow and green. Its dominance is as unnatural as its colour, motivated by government subsidies to grow it for biodiesel production, and it drives half the population crazy with its hay fever provoking scent. Despite all this, I love it. I love everything about this brash landscape of unrepentant lime greens and artificial food colouring yellows, which is why I am already starting to feel anxious about its imminent demise. Just this morning I noticed white May blossom and peachy cones of horse chestnut blooms sneaking onto the perimeter, silently upstaging their raucous counterparts with their understated elegance. The Cotswolds by Gauguin is slipping into the diffused light of The Cotswolds by Monet, and I cannot watch. Tomorrow I leave for three nights in Cornwall to seek solace by the sea.