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Boylestone Show is almost here!

Posted on July 17, 2008

Dear J, I will be sending you the latest glossy brochure of the Boylestone Show which this year promises to be even bigger than the Olympics. Your accom has been arranged here and we suggest you come Friday 22nd and leave when you feel up to it. Cheers. B&R

Said glossy brochure arrived today. Would think I’ve been invited for a weekend at Highgrove. Am over the moon just reading the Rules and Conditions of Entry, which are very serious indeed:
1. All entries to be submitted between 10am and 12noon and to remain on show until 4:30pm
2. No competitor may win more than ONE PRIZE in any class.
3. The Judge’s decision is FINAL
4. Horticulture and Cookery entries not claimed by 4:45pm deemed to have been given to the Village Hall and will be auctioned at 5:15pm.
5. Any protest must be made in writing, and the Committee will re-allocate prizes accordingly if the protest is upheld.
6. The Committee, while taking ordinary care, will not be responsible for any loss or damage to exhibits.
7. All exhibits shall have been made or grown by the exhibitor.
8. The winners of the Challeng Cups MUST undertake to return them to the Chairman at least two weeks before the Annual Show.

Boylestone isn’t in the Cotswolds, but now well into my second summer season in the Cotswolds it still sets the standard for me when it comes to the English tradition of village fetes/shows. This is what I wrote about it after my first visit in 2005. Sadly, Barbara the landlady has since passed away.:

Our afternoon started in the lovely, head ducking, timber-beamed pub, The Rose and Crown. The landlady, Barbara, looks alarmingly like Barbara Bush and greeted husband and me like regulars, including calling us “duck.” We ordered half-pints of Pedigree bitter (“Pedi”) and white rolls filled with roast beef and cheese. Someone had brought a pork pie and put it on the bar to share with a little dish of English mustard. While we ate, I admired the framed picture on the wall of Barbara and other villagers at the recent wedding of Charles and Camilla. For such a small place, there sure were a lot of them at the big event (apparently the village was a favourite of Charles’ from the days of the hunt). Next to the picture was a framed thank you note from the royal couple, graciously acknowledging the gift of a walking stick. Watered and fed, we walked to the Village Hall and Parish Church.

The Village Hall hosted the horticultural section of the show and S., a local doctor and home gardener, gave me a guided tour. For each plate of “six perfect shallots,” S. provided careful details of village provenance. There were speckled eggs, apples, pears, plums, runner beans, cauliflower and cabbage. Glossy red onions wore decorative green ties around their tops. Enormous marrows and elaborate vegetable boxes (category: “Collection of six kinds of home-grown vegetables in a box not larger than 2 foot square”) dominated the far wall. Rows of brilliant dahlias (large, medium, pom-pom, cactus), asters and gladioli ran the length of the hall.

Inside the church were the cookery, craft, flower arrangement, junior, teenage and photographic section entries. I took mental note of the items I wanted to bid on in the upcoming auction, including a child’s cap knitted to resemble a Christmas pudding, homemade wines, lemon curd, pickled onions, and Bakewell tarts (my favorite dessert).

At 5:15PM, the auction began. In no time, I worked myself into a frenzy worthy of a Damien Hirst on the block at Sotheby’s. A successful bid on the second place winner in the “Home-made Wine – Dry” category yielded me a bottle labelled “Parsip and Ginge.” Presumably this meant parsnip and ginger, an understandable mistake if the winemaker penned the label after consuming some of his or her own wares.

Six shortbread biscuits and a box of tomatoes later, I engaged in a fierce battle for a Bakewell tart. The bidding and my desperation escalated in step until husband gallantly interceded with a decisive bid of ₤5. Never have I felt so in love. When it was all over we also owned a trio of leeks, a baffling quantity of red onions, and a box of fancy Thornton’s mints that my husband won in the raffle — easily the best ₤10 we spent all summer.

England

The Town that Architects Forgot

Posted on July 16, 2008

Swindon is a “new town” which is British for a town that architects forgot. I had an interview there recently for a job as an IT director at a computing society. I don’t particularly want to be the IT director at a computing society but my company is in the middle of laying off half the global workforce and so it seemed like I should at least take advantage of the interview practice.Husband was very excited about this interview. He would be excited if I had an interview for a job as a window washer in Swindon. This is because Swindon is within commuting distance of our cottage in the Cotswolds. His vision: I could live full-time in the Cotswolds, we could sell or rent our London flat, and he could downsize to a studio during the week when he needs to be there. This is one step closer to his dream of a full-time life in the country. He thinks if I jump first this will embolden him to make the entrepreneurial move he dreams of in a year or so’s time.

Chicken.

We decided to drive to Swindon on the Sunday before the interview to scope it out. It was raining and cold and there was supposedly a movie theatre there to help us take our minds off the fact that we don’t seem to be having a summer this year. We drove to the train station first. Husband loves train stations and bemoaning the demise of the steam railways that used to connect many of the Cotswolds villages. Swindon in the rain was the most depressing place I’ve ever been. How could a city on the edge of the Cotswolds look this way? It shouldn’t be allowed.

I was impatient and wanted to leave the train station. Husband shouted, I pouted, and we drove back to our cottage without seeing a movie.I know it’s unrealistic to think I can work in a building that looks like the inside of the Mondrian hotel on the Sunset Strip forever, especially now that my company is owned by a cost conscious private equity firm. But for now that is where I work, all gleaming white and glass, nestled in the posh London neighborhood of Kensington, moments from Hyde Park and Holland Park and the only Whole Foods in England (another topic worthy of it’s own blog – oh the glory).

Aesthetics matter. I’m not just being shallow: philosophers know this and Alain de Botton wrote a whole book about it, The Architecture of Happiness.After the interview I was a little more optimistic. The building is in an office park with all the charm of Heathrow, but you get your own parking space. After three years of buses and tubes in London, the idea of driving to work and having a parking space reminds me of life in L.A. in a good way – lots of commute time to listen to Radio 4, the KCRW equivalent. The guy who interviewed me and would be my boss was nice, I could definitely work for him. As he walked me out of the office after the interview he pointed out a basket of fruit on a filing cabinet and informed me that free fruit was a perk of working at the company. He was being serious. I didn’t think it a good time to tell him we have a bar at my office. A week later I learned I didn’t get the job. Something about an epiphany when interviewing another candidate that they needed a much more technical person than spec’d. He didn’t even ask me any stupid technical questions! Nevermind how I feel about Swindon, my pride was hurt. If anybody’s looking for me I’ll be taking solace in Schopenhauer.

Talking Points

Posted on March 30, 2008

There are three topics of conversation that will see you through an evening in any country pub:

1. The weather. Coming from L.A. where the weather is the same all year except for the two weeks it rains, it took me some time to fully appreciate the depth of this topic in the British Isles. You could spend a whole evening on it.

2. The decline of the BBC. Mention “liberal bias.”

3. The dismal state of London’s public transport. Share your favorite hot/smelly/expensive anecdote from last time you were “in the city.” Your acquaintance will have one too, and everyone loves to complain.

And lately, there has been a fourth: the American presidential election. Brits are into this in a way most Americans can’t imagine, a perfect microcosm of the somewhat one-sided “special relationship” between these two countries. It reminds me of an anecdote I read this weekend in the FT about what it means to be an Oxonian (i.e., someone who attended Oxford). A professor at the University of Glasgow wrote to a professor at Oxford saying, “I hope you don’t think we don’t like you.”

The Oxonian replied, “We don’t think of you at all.”

Cotswolds England

Bunburyists Unite!

Posted on March 23, 2008

I just found out I am a Bunburyist rather than a Weekender. What a relief. Weekenders are reviled throughout the English countryside. They drive up property prices so locals can’t afford to buy anything, then limit the use of their luxury barn conversions to bank holiday weekends. When they do show up, it’s in an enormous Chelsea tractor. I know all about Weekenders because the British media loves to do stories on them. Hardly a month goes by without a sarky editorial in Cotswold Life on these hedge fund men and their Cath Kidston, vintage print-bedecked wives, children, and kitchens. Channel 4 ran a whole documentary on how Weekenders ruined a small Cornish fishing village. To protect against this locust, one member of the landed gentry, Lord Vestey, reserves cottages in his hamlet for locals only. According to a tipsy and possibly dubious source down at the pub, even the government is out to get the Weekender: second homers are contributing to the country’s housing shortage and legislation or taxation or some equally unpleasant “-tion” is imminent.

You can understand why husband and I were worried. We do, after all, work in London during the week and go to the Cotswolds on, well, weekends. But that’s about where the similarities end. We don’t manage hedge funds or work in “the City.” We’re devoted to our country cottage and come every weekend without fail. If there’s a fete or a church service or a charity event, we’ll be there; we’ll even buy raffle tickets. And I’ve never set foot in a Cath Kidston shop in my life.

Frankly, I don’t understand why the countryside has been infiltrated with bankers. If you’re really wealthy, London is a wonderful place to live. If, on the other hand, like us you can only afford a scant quarter million on a flat and you desire to live in central London, you have to make some compromises. You might need to live on a street where you occasionally see a man relieving himself behind the dumpsters on the corner, or be neighbours with a house full of squatters on the premises of a former Conservative club (sign and irony still intact). You might wonder what that lady in a mini skirt and a cropped fur coat is doing talking to that gentleman when you leave the house for an unusually early morning jog, or, just once, be greeted by a large yellow sign asking if you know anything about the body dumped in the canal as you decide it’s best to upgrade your jog to a sprint along the tow path. And if you’re young enough, you can probably dismiss these kinds of things as quirky or colourful, the very fibre of your bohemian urban life. But we are old enough to realize that my husband’s recent modest inheritance — enough to give us some additional square footage in our current London neighbourhood but not to deliver us into the genteel reaches of, say, Kensington and Chelsea — was well spent on a cottage in the country, if only for the weekends.

It was Oscar Wilde by way of the Daily Telegraph that delivered me from my angst over my Weekender status. The term Bunburyist comes from the imaginary character, Bunbury, in Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”; he was invented as an excuse for Algernon to go to the country, where Algernon lives a different but equally vibrant life to his city existence. Building on this, journalist Kate Weinberg wrote a handy checklist to distinguish between Bunburyist and Weekender.

According to Weinberg, a Bunburyist buys groceries at farm shops and takes them back to the city. Tick. Other attributes include thinking of both city and country as “home,” socialising with residents of both rather than just importing friends from the city for the weekend, and “meddling” in local projects. Tick, tick, tick. That was us at the meeting to save the local post office.

A Weekender, on the other hand, will arrive in the country equipped with groceries from the city supermarket. Clearly these weekenders haven’t been to the Sainsbury’s at Ladbroke Grove, otherwise known as one of Dante’s circles of hell. If I “cheat” and forsake our local farm shop for the Sainsbury’s in Cheltenham, the nearest city to our country retreat, it’s to pick up toilet paper or laundry detergent to take back to London.

Weekenders are also identified by their limited activity, just “a couple of good walks.” Not with my husband. We’ll walk for sure, but we’ll also hurtle down hills on road bikes and jog the country lanes. We’ve joined the gym at the school in a nearby village, and there are noises about dry stone walling lessons.

Before I found out I was a Bunburyist instead of a Weekender I used to seek counsel from other weekenders in our Cotswold town. R. and R., a gay couple with whom we’ve made acquaintance, know the power of the pink pound and are unapologetic about their weekend-only tenure. They figure they inject more money into the local economy in two days than most full-timers do all week, which is true for us too if spend in pubs and restaurants is any measure. And as Bunburyists we have the advantage of being unfettered by the bitter local politics—something about the removal of a chess table—that prevent some full-time residents from enjoying a meal out in our town’s inn.

England

Four Seasons in a Day

Posted on March 22, 2008

Driving to the country I heard on Radio 4 that this is the earliest Easter for 100 years. The weather is appropriately confused, and on Good Friday we go through four seasons in a day, ala Hugh Grant strolling down Portobello Road in the film Notting Hill. On a morning walk we move from bright sunshine into a snowstorm in the space of a mile. It even looks like a Hollywood set: nothing sticks and the wind is blowing the flakes in spirals, an out of control snowblower with an unlimited supply of styrafoam. B. calls to excuse us from our scheduled Easter visit to his Derbyshire village if the weather is too bad to drive in. “You’ll have to try harder than a little snow if you’re looking to get rid of us,” I tell him.”Earthquake?” he ventures.”Expect us for opening time at the Rose and Crown,” I say before hanging up. We love B. and R., but we also love their pub. It’s in Boylestone but attracts a crowd from neighboring villages like Cubley and Somersal Herbert (I wish I lived in Somersal Herbert just so I had a reason to say it out loud). The mix is half farmers, half well-to-do semi-retired types, and 100% straight out of the book of English central casting including fumbling, charming aristocrats, gentleman farmers, and village idiots. All this makes for stimulating conversation. Last time I was there I got a recipe for damson gin (apparently good for cold days on the links), bought bacon from a local farmer, unlocked the secret for herding sheep on a steep hillside, and learned a new joke (although failed to master the Yorkshire accent required to tell it properly). In retrospect, it was our introduction to country life long before the Cotswolds.

England

The Gold Cup

Posted on March 14, 2008

I didn’t organise tickets to the Cheltenham festival, less well known than Royal Ascot outside the UK, but nonetheless a huge week in British horse racing. I must regain the enthusiasm I had when I first moved to London. With a little help from corporate friends and some patient queuing I managed a stellar sporting calendar in the early years —Henley Regatta, Royal Ascot, and Wimbledon. Thus far I’ve only made it to the Cheltenham racecourse for the Sunday car boot sale, a worthy but entirely different sort of sporting event.

I think I am sapped from my thankless job, but the truth is lots of tasks requiring organization—paying bills, booking travel, doing laundry— have gone out the window since buying Drovers. It took three past due letters from British Gas to motivate me. Chores used to happen on weekends, but now the pressure’s on to be “enjoying ourselves” come the weekend, especially if the weather is nice. That false pressure to have a good time that used to be the reserve of real vacations has, with the purchase of a second home, become a weekly event. Woe is me.

And so I 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. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I immediately sided with Denman. As interesting as the race itself was the spectacle of the attendees. The place was swimming in gloriously vulgar hats that are as synonymous with English weddings and horse races as Hermes scarves are with French mademoiselles. I still treasure my own hot pink pimp hat purchased for Ascot. It may not be as versatile as a Hermes scarf but the opportunities in life to wear vision obstructing, fuchsia coloured feathers on your head are rare and must be taken.

Denman crushed Kauto Star, a victory for brashness of every kind, including big hats.

Cotswolds England

A Word about Fox Hunting

Posted on March 9, 2008

Since I brought up the subject of fox hunting in my recent blog about the Cotswold Hunt auction, I thought I ought to explain my take on this controversial topic.

First let me attempt to establish some liberal street cred. I’m a Democrat and pro-choice. I attempt to buy local and organic. I take public transport while in the city. You get the picture.

And yet I’ll never forget the look of horror on my London co-worker and fellow yoga class attendee’s face when I told her I’d spent an evening at a hunt auction. “You don’t support that kind of thing, do you?” she asked, bewildered.

I reminded her the nasty part of hunting had been banned for awhile now and explained my interest was more Margaret Mead-esque, an observer of the charming local wildlife (by which I mean the toffs of course, not the foxes). She still look confused, but downward dog put an end to the conversation.

My pub survey of country gentlemen and women consistently yields a “foxes are vermin” defense of the hunt. There are many stories of a fox in the hen house or amongst the flock. There is also the whole economy built up around the hunt—local caterers and pubs provide breakfast and lunch, not to mention the tourists. And there is no denying the social aspect. It is rather like a big all day party both for the riders and the observers, who move from post to post along the country lanes to get a good view.

Being American gives me a bit of an outsider status that parlays well into nosy, politically charged questions like this in the pub. I can, if you will, play dumb. But my nationality does not preclude me from participating in the hunt—it is in fact an American pursuit as well I’ve recently learned. An unpleasant experience mucking out stalls at summer camp that put me off horses for a lifetime is what dictates that I’ll never be part of the hunting culture. Still I am happy on the sidelines, indulging my closet gambling instinct at a fund raising auction or watching from the country lanes.

Last weekend husband and I found ourselves in the midst of a hunt while out on a morning ramble. We first came across a horse-mounted and hunt-attired father and his two sons, say around ages 8 and 12, separated from the larger group. We encountered them at a gate and they were disarmingly polite, well-spoken and self-possessed children as they gave way and let us pass. It was all very “no, you,” “no, you,” “jolly good,” and “tally ho.”

This stirred an epiphany in husband. He’s from Liverpool which is pretty much the flag-bearer city for the working man and socialism in the Western world (where Michael Moore goes to premiere his movies in the UK). There is much to be said in defence of Liverpool — The Beatles and European City of Culture 2008 to name two — but the city still has a reputation for being working class and tough. Many a punchline about Liverpudlians involve a propensity for stealing and wearing tracksuits. Although husband has traversed his difficult Liverpool upbringing, replete with parental alcoholism and mental illness, the class mythos ingrained in him as a child lives on. He expected these hunt children to snort with derision while instructing their horses to kick mud on us as they passed by. In short, his own class pre-conceptions, long dormant but still alive, were exposed.

Not longer after the hunting family encounter, the entire hunt party emerged from a deep gully. They charged up a hill, all blue coats and shaved horses, accompanied by a pack of hounds. We watched, a few meters away, as the handsome spectacle unfurled itself across the countryside.

California England

The First Hop: Los Angeles to London – May 2005

Posted on January 19, 2008

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

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

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

So I did.

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

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

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

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

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

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