Cotswolds

I spent this morning watching husband whip himself into a froth triggered by the fact that he has left his pants (trousers) at home in London. This means he can’t wear his Bermuda shorts walking as he intended to do because then he won’t have anything to wear out to dinner for the rest of the weekend. This means he is now wandering around our beautiful stone cottage stamping his feet and sighing in his best rendition of a 7-year old girl’s temper tantrum bemoaning his lack of appropriate rambling gear.

“I forgot my pants, the weekend is ruined,” he announces. I decide to sit down. This is going to take awhile.

After the better part of an hour, husband has arrived at the rational solution of repurposing his running gear into walking gear. He is now dressed in an orange sweat wicking tank top, black running shorts, hiking boots, gaiters, and backpack. He looks like a gay pumpkin. I of course assure him that he looks absolutely fine, and we are shortly trekking out the back of our cottage.

The Cotswolds are an obvious choice for a second home: easily accessible from London, beautiful scenery, charm laden pubs, and historic architecture. It’s so obvious that it’s almost become obscure. British second home owners seem to be far more enamoured with the warmth and romance of Tuscany, French countryside, or the Costa del Sol thanks to the advent of Ryanair and EasyJet.

I exaggerate a bit on the obscurity point. The Cotswolds are home to a generous selection of the great and good, from Prince Charles to Liz Hurley, and there’s something unmistakably obvious in that. They are also firmly on the tourist map, although tourists tend to stick to only a few of the vast network of villages that make up the Cotswolds. But for an American and a newly repatriated Brit, the Cotswolds is as exotic as it comes. It’s the England from central casting, the one that’s lost in the international melee of London where I hardly recognize the languages being spoken into mobile phones on my daily bus commute. And by this I don’t mean it’s white, although it largely is. I mean the rose strewn cottages and grand manor houses, green hills and sheep, dry stone walls and honey coloured stone, and tweed and wellies, often adorning the great English eccentric holding court in any given pub or inn. I also mean the sense of community and decency. We’ve made more friends in two months in the Cotswolds than we made in two years in London. And on Saturday night we did our best to alienate them all.

We were hosting our first out of town guest at the cottage, MF, an old friend over from New York. Thus far on his visit we had spent a lot of time gossiping at the big table in the local wine bar, the best laid dinner plans forsaken for another bottle of Prosecco. We did manage to get him out for a walk and a proper pub lunch at the Black Horse, but only after a trip to the country mart where he procured a pair of stylish black wellies that could seamlessly transition from Cotswold mud to German industrial techno club (not that I have any reason to believe he frequents German industrial techno clubs).

But the highlight of the visit was our Night at the Races charity event. There had been much discussion beforehand about what a night at the races would be since it was being held in the village hall rather than a racetrack. The consensus between husband and our neighbours who were going with us was that it would be betting on pre-recorded horse races shown on video monitors. We had gotten a race guide with our pre-purchased tickets, each sponsored by local businesses so one could, for example, bet on Lambchop to place in the butcher’s race.

When we arrived at the hall there were a few authentic elements of the race track experience, including a ruthlessly efficient betting setup and a bar. That’s about where the similarities ended. Attendees were seated around a giant central checker board set out in masking tape. Our assigned table was front and center of the checker board so we were on display like some kind of demented bridal party. Stroppy teenagers, three of each gender, jockeyed rocking horse-sized wooden steeds painted in bright colours with mop string hair. Their parents definitely made them do it. A tuxedoed MC called for volunteers to throw the giant fuzzy dice that would power the wooden horses up and back the checkerboard. Husband, no wallflower, was first to throw.

A childless couple and a gay man 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, MF 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 a wee bit undermined by our blood alcohol content). MF then became obsessed with getting a turn at the dice throwing, 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 smoke break between races five and six.

Our true colours only went on full display at the end of the evening when a young man in a wheelchair took the microphone to thank everyone. He was the beneficiary of the evening’s fund raising, which would go to buy a sports wheel chair so he could play tennis. He was confident, gracious and eloquent, so much so that we immediately sobered up in the full realization of what a loving and supportive community we’d so recklessly imposed ourselves on. This man didn’t need our charity. We were far more desperate specimens who could clearly benefit from our own fundraiser to pay for the many hours of therapy we each require.

Through it all our neighbors sat next to us smiling patiently. It’s further testament to the fine people of our Cotswold town that they still speak to us.

After weeks of trying to pretend an Egyptian rug on a concrete floor and an Ikea table and chairs left by the last owners were comfortable and/or cozy, today I made some progress in the cottage-ification of the interior of Drovers. Naturally I went to Laura Ashley, my first visit since the mid-eighties when my mother took advantage of the favourable exchange rate to festoon my sister and me in drop-waist florals from Sloane Square. (Another artifact from that era, a navy blue Burberry wax coat, is totally apropos of my new Gloucestershire life. That it is moth bitten just makes it more so). I left with orders placed for one antiqued brass-effect reading lamp, a saddle brown leather couch and footstool, and a pair of red and beige gingham checked curtains. The floral drop-waists with lace collars have been retired, but my cottage will soon be clad in the interior design equivalent.

Next was a visit to the antiques arcade. This Aladdin’s cave of fox hunting prints and horse brasses is far more ‘curated garage sale’ than Christie’s, which is just as well given the damage from my Laura Ashley haul. I left with a hammered brass coal scuttle and some Vanity Fair prints for under £70. I am slightly worried the print depicting a turbaned Punjabi polo player might be construed as racist, but the companion print of a mustachioed, barrel-torsoed Englishman captioned “I Say” looks equally ridiculous. I should be more worried our cottage is going to look like a pub.

Near the Risdales we discovered a gigantic reclamation yard, a paradise for newbies like us striving for the Cotswold look. Outside is a vast graveyard for stone ornaments – toadstools, orbs, troughs, and bird baths – that are the garden gnomes of the Cotswolds. I had been warned that you can tell weekenders by the reproduction coach lights hanging on their barn conversions. I suspect a disused wagon wheel in the garden sends the same message, but I got one anyway (the garden is fenced in, protecting my cliché from public scorn).

Inside the proprietor produced a pock marked length of elm we’ll turn into a mantle piece, and a ledge and brace pine door for the kitchen. I noticed the 1930s suitcase, the one I’ll decorate with replica vintage luggage labels from The Pompidou Centre and plop in that empty spot underneath the stairs, as I was paying for the other stuff. Better throw in the ink jars to decorate the chest of drawers and a handful of dusty hardbacks for good measure.

It was about 9 months between the time we first visited the Pudding Club and when we finally picked up the keys to our very own honey-coloured stone cottage. Still, we spent most weekends during that period in the Cotswolds, my bank statements a testament to our heavy investment in the B&B sector last summer.

The regular visits started in June when my mother-in-law became very ill and went into the hospital in Lancaster. After each visit up North, we would stop in the Cotswolds on our way back to London for a bit of solace from the death that was playing out in front of us. Dinner in a pub would inevitably turn into an enquiry about a room. It was during these stopovers that husband threw himself into a property search with typical zeal (he is real estate obsessed, logging considerable quality time each week with television “friends” like Phil and Kirsty). In retrospect the sudden obsession with a place in the country was probably a grief avoidance tactic, but I too was grateful for the distraction. And so it was that much of our exploration of the area was at the mercy of estate agents.

One of the first places an agent tooks us was to the village of G.P., to see a slightly dilapidated chocolate box cottage in a village full of chocolate boxes nestled in sheep-strewn green hills. That the village came equipped with two pubs and a post office was a bonus. We fell hard for the impractical one up / one down with a leaking roof and cobweb-covered windows even though it could never reasonably be anything more than a holiday home.

We made a low-ball offer, but one that was still financially reckless for us. Oblivious to the mercy of his actions, the owner rejected it. But shortly thereafter he offered a sweet deal on a long-term weekend rental, presumably on the theory that the test drive would convince us to up our offer. Thus the vilage of G.P. became our weekend retreat from which we watched the credit crisis and property crash develop while we looked for our perfect weekend retreat.

Our house came with a name, Drovers Cottage, spelled out in gold ye olde English script on a black plaque hanging above the front door. I had no idea what Drovers meant, but being American and a sucker for a house with a name, I loved it anyway.

Some Googling soon revealed a drover to be one who drives livestock long distances to market. I assumed this had something to do with the sheep trade that made this region rich, but the cottage post-dates the height of the town’s golden fleece fuelled glory. Further Googling revealed a connection that matches the age of the cottage. Welsh cattle drovers are documented to have used a route through our town in the nineteenth century. Opposite our cottage are Stable and Hayloft cottages where perhaps years ago these drovers housed their herds for the evening. Today I continue the tradition of immigrant labour, occasionally trying to hijack the wireless network at Hayloft.

Drovers cottage lies along a curving row of stone terraced houses that ends with a mill house and the stream. The town history reveals that this micro-neighborhood was once a dual mill, pre-Norman hamlet that was incorporated into the main town in the fourteenth century. Behind the mill is the most distinctive architectural feature of the town, the twelfth century church that came into its own with fifteenth century wool money. From this church springs a one hundred foot tower, crowned by a gleaming cockerel weathervane. The tower houses the eight bell carillon that rings to the tune of Hanover every hour through the day and the night (as we learned on our first overnight visit last year).

At the opposite end of our row of cottages is the entrance to the village green, now a small parking lot bordered by well-kept half-timbered buildings, including a butcher that sells the best sausages in the world, Eastleach spotless. To the left is a small lane that runs alongside the pub and opens onto the market square. The market still held here once a week is a legacy from the early thirteenth century when King Henry III granted the town a charter allowing it. In addition to the pub, the market square is bordered by a pharmacy, a post office, a green grocers/bakery, a wine shop/bar, and a takeaway Chinese restaurant, the latter two of which figured unreasonably in our decision to buy here.

One route out of the market square takes you past the war memorial and onto The West End. The higgedly piggedly row of Georgian and medieval houses removes any confusion with London’s synonymous theatre neighborhood. At the end of the End is the Roman road and the old prison, recently converted into a coffee shop and internet cafe. The alternate route out of the square takes you to the main A road, with newer developments and council housing on either side. Fields of sheep soften the intrusion of modernity into my rural fantasia. I’m in love.