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Suzie’s

Posted on October 22, 2010

Today I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a very long time: I stopped for breakfast on my way to work at Suzie’s, a roadside trailer with a bright red awning parked on a turnout near Seven Springs. Suzie’s is not of the gourmet food truck ilk that I’ve read has swept Los Angeles, but rather a standard British burger van. You can order pretty much any combination of the basic elements of a traditional British fry up, and it’s delivered in a bap (bun), which is good for absorbing the brown sauce and grease. I chose egg and tomato with a cup of tea. While Suzie cooked she chatted with another woman customer about the three chaps in plus fours leaning against their Land Rover and eating bacon butties. (Despite the fact that shooting clothes are a familiar sight this time of year, seeing them still reminds me of golfers from the 1920s.) They had apparently committed the serious offense of paying for their breakfast with large bills.

“What do you expect from someone who pays £43 to shoot a bird out of the sky,” Suzie remarked.

I checked my wallet and breathed a sigh of relief to see a £10 note, which didn’t seem too egregious for about £4 worth of breakfast. When she handed over my bap I opened it to find mushroom and tomato instead of egg and tomato. I hesitated for a moment before asking her to add an egg — I didn’t want to annoy her like the shooting party had. She did insist I had asked for mushroom and tomato, which she claimed to remember because she thought it was strange, but she was cracking the egg at the same time as defending herself so I figured she wasn’t too mad. Then she asked me where I was from and what I thought about the British weather, so I knew I was OK in Suzie’s book. And it turns out mushroom, egg, and tomato makes a good bap, good enough for Suzie’s to become a weekly tradition.

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

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

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.

Cotswolds

The Houseguest and the Happy Ending

Posted on May 3, 2010

This bank holiday weekend we hosted husband’s brother who, on the heels of the breakup of his long term romance, was in need of some country R&R. Several hours into his visit he lost his mobile phone while out on a ramble with husband. We scoured the presumed area where it was dropped before giving up and heading for the pub. Even securing the phone number of the lady working behind the wine bar failed to dispel the gloom of the lost mobile phone that enveloped him that evening.

The next morning while our house guest was taking a shower I noticed he had left his bath towel in the bedroom. I shouted through the bathroom door that I had left it over the stair railing for him, only for him to shout back that he had brought his own towel. Unsure whether to be insulted by this, I went back downstairs to make coffee. A few minutes later I heard the whir of a blowdryer and realized our houseguest had also brought his own small appliances with him. Distracted by trying to remember if I had ever met another man who blow dried his hair, I forgot about being insulted by the towel incident. I recalled that our house guest had arrived yesterday with only a compact black satchel, which at the time struck me as fastidious. No wonder this very prepared man was so disturbed by losing his mobile phone. I suspect the fact that he was capable of losing his phone was as disturbing to him as the loss of the phone itself.

After breakfast we set out to retrace the steps of the previous day’s ramble in a last ditch attempt to locate the phone. It was a beautiful day and the route was through the Chedworth wood, now lined with bluebells so hardly a hassle. At the top of the woods husband rang the lost phone one last time and, to his surprise, someone answered. A local man had picked it up the day before while out walking his dog. He had also put it on his own charger at home in case the owner called it and made several calls to people in the recently dialed list in an attempt to find the owner. We had assured our houseguest that if someone local found the phone this was likely to be the outcome. Needless to say it was a rather different result than our London-based houseguest expected. In ten minutes we were at the house of the man who had found the phone, thanking him for his kindness and for providing our houseguest with a much needed happy ending.

Cotswolds Cycling

Cycling the Hollywold Hills

Posted on April 18, 2010

Before I moved to England I lived in Los Angeles for ten years. Despite my residence in the capital city of celebrity, I rarely encountered one. In fact, I can think of only three times when I did, and one of those happened before I even lived there. I was thirteen and visiting my grandmother, which always involved a lunch outing to Canter’s Deli on Fairfax Avenue. On this occasion our elderly and insistent waitress pointed out Whoopi Goldberg at the deli counter and ushered me over to ask for her autograph, which Ms. Goldberg obligingly provided. Later, when I actually lived in L.A., I worked at Capitol Records for a few years. One day Bonnie Raitt was wandering around our floor with her hair in rollers before a video shoot. I didn’t see her though; I was out to lunch at the time of her reported appearance. My penchant for going out to lunch was rewarded when I later saw Quentin Tarantino in a booth at Birds, a chicken restaurant near the Capitol Tower.

Five years ago I moved to London from Los Angeles and then, three years later, to the Cotswolds. I went rural for the same reason I imagine many people in their thirties and forties leave London: that intangible oft described as quality of life. The last thing I expected to find amongst the honey-colored stone and rolling hills was a profusion of celebrity, but in the past two years I’ve had more star sightings than during my decade in Hollywood. I chalk this up to two factors. One is the pervasive car culture in L.A. Given the proportion of time most people spend in their cars there, it’s amazing you ever meet anyone in the flesh. The other is that neither my budget nor social stature in California supported frequenting the haunts where celebrities like to spend their time when they are not in their cars, Quentin Tarantino’s taste for budget chicken restaurants aside.

In the Cotswolds there is a distinct absence of establishments with velvet ropes and twenty dollar cocktails. No bouncer in a headset is going to ask you if you are “on the list,” although I do know somebody who managed to get banned from our local wine bar due to non-payment of his tab and the general indiscretion of being, in the words of the proprietor, an ass. The point is that the celebrities here have to mingle with the regular folk because pubs and inns and the odd wine bar are the only places to go if you want to have a drink out.

The other notable change in my lifestyle in the Cotswolds versus Los Angeles is that my preferred method of transportation is, weather allowing, my bicycle. There are endless country roads where you are more likely to come across a tractor than a car, and travelling them by bike puts you in touch with the landscape — the patterns of the hills and valleys, the flora and fauna — in an up close, visceral way inaccessible by car. It also happens that most of my Cotswold celebrity encounters have happened on cycling outings. And so in the spirit of the Hollywood star map I offer up the Hollywold map, two intermediate, all-day (thirty to forty mile) cycling routes with celebrity spotting potential. Even if you don’t bump into someone famous, you’re sure to encounter the real stars of this place: chocolate box cottages and stately manor homes, all in quintessential Cotswold stone; a cast list of snowdrops, daffodils, rapeseed, May blossom, elderflower, and blackberries in roughly seasonal order of appearance; and of course the sheep, cows, odd pheasant, race horse farms, and, if you’re lucky, a Gloucester Old Spot pig or two.

Route 1
Northleach – Daylesford loop
http://www.getamap.ordnancesurveyleisure.co.uk/?key=u6JE9qec8dNZil119UKoHQ2

Both rides start in Northleach, a market town near the center of the Cotswolds whose local inn has fed and watered several music superstars. Recently spotted: a member of the Rolling Stones.

1. Head out of Northleach on Farmington Road, just northeast of the market square. The ride starts with two climbs in rapid succession before you freewheel through Farmington and into Sherborne.

2. Past the Sherborne Social Club, take a left following the sign for the National Trust Water Meadows parking lot. It’s up another hill before you hit a stretch of semi- desolate plateau with sweeping views of the valleys to either side. On the left you can look down over some of the most famous Cotswold villages, Bourton-on-the-Water, and farther west, the Slaughters.

3. Take the first road on your right (if you get to Clapton, you’ve gone too far). Head down the steep hill, taking care along this weather damaged stretch of road. Follow the road into Great Rissington, then up past the Lamb Inn. At the next junction go left, past the airfield into Upper Rissington.

4. Church Westcote, reportedly Kate Winslet’s neck of the woods, is just to the east, but avoid the busy A road and, at the top of Upper Rissington, jog left then right towards Icomb. Follow the signs to Bledington then Kingham where you can make a pit stop at the Kingham Plough. You may not bump into Blur bassist Alex James here, but you can do the next best thing and eat his goat’s cheese. Better yet, take the left fork out of Kingham and in a short while you’ll be at the Daylesford Organic retail complex.

5. Daylesford has outposts around London, including Notting Hill, Pimlico and Harvey Nichols, but this is the mother ship, boasting a spa, yoga studio, garden and kitchen boutiques, butcher and food store/cafe. It’s no wonder celebs feel at home here; even the vegetable displays look set designed. During my last few lunches in the cafe I spotted a member of resurgent British boy (now middle aged man) band, Take That, on an outing with his kids and a British actor best known, according to Wikipedia, for playing “assertive bureaucrats or villains.” Should you wish for more bucolic company, pick up some goodies from the deli and enjoy a picnic on the estate.

6. Leave Daylesford and retrace your route through Kingham. Instead of heading right to Bledington, head left for Foscot, where you will fork left for Milton under Wychwood. Fork left again off the High Street then take your second right, crossing the A424 and heading into Taynton, then Great Barrington and right into Windrush. Follow the road into Sherborne where you’ll recognize your turn off from the morning by the National Trust Water Meadows sign post. Continue straight, taking the second left where this time you’ll see National Trust signs for Ewe Pen parking. It’s uphill to the A40 where you should take care crossing.

7. Once over the A40 you’ll cycle past another National Trust property, Lodge Park, which was used for deer coursing, gambling, and drinking in the 17th century. In other words it was a rural version of Vegas which the celebrities of the day may have enjoyed. Take your first right towards Eastington, which leads you back into Northleach.

Route 2
Northleach – Eastleach – Barnsley loop (a.k.a. The Supermodel Circuit)
http://www.getamap.ordnancesurveyleisure.co.uk/?key=qAlarUYnQbjDwAItzxj8Ig2

1. As with the first route, leave Northleach via the Farmington Road and continue through Farmington into Sherborne. Instead of turning left at the sign for the Water Meadows parking lot, continue on into Windrush then little Barrington, all the way into Burford, about ten miles in total. There are many options for refreshment on and around the handsome Burford high street, but you may wish to wait for the more secluded pub in Eastington, seven miles away.

2. After you’ve had your fill of Burford, head out the same way you came in, on Sheep Street, and take your first left on to Tanner’s Lane. Head up the hill to the A40, where you jog right along a pavement before crossing with care at the next left.

3. Follow the road through Westwell all the way to Eastleach where, just to the left as you enter the village, the Victoria Inn is perched on a hill. The star offering on the menu is pork from the nearby Eastleach Downs farm, but the first time I went to this pub I had a star sighting of another type: Kate Moss made an appearance, wearing wellies and a mud splotched cardigan. As she drove off in her vintage Roller, she tooted the horn and gave a wave to the bemused patrons sitting at the picnic tables on the front lawn.

4. Leave Eastleach the way you came in, then head left briefly before turning right for Hatherop and then on to Coln St. Aldwyns. From here you could go right into Bibury, site of Bibury Court, a fine Jacobean mansion converted into a hotel, as well as the oft photographed series of cottages known as Arlington Row. Alternatively go left out of Coln St. Aldwyns towards Quenington, taking the first right onto the Welsh Way before you hit the center of Quenington. This takes you all the way into Barnsley along a less busy road than the B4425, which you’ll have to brave if you choose to get to Barnsley via Bibury.

5. Barnsley’s most famous resident is yet another supermodel/actress, Liz Hurley. I’ve never seen her there, but I have enjoyed the fine gardens at Barnsley House, which are open to the public for a small admission charge. Barnsley House also owns the Village Pub across the street, a good place to stop for refreshment before the last leg of the journey back to Northleach.

6. Leaving Barnsley House or the Village Pub, take the second right off the B4425 and follow it all the way back, through Coln Rogers, Coln St Dennis, and into Northleach.

The Details
The Wheatsheaf Inn
West End
Northleach
Gloucestershire GL5 3EZ
01451 860244
http://www.cotswoldswheatsheaf.com/

Kingham Plough
The Green
Kingham
Chipping Norton
Oxfordshire OX7 6YD01608 658 327
http://www.thekinghamplough.co.uk/

Daylesford Organic
Daylesford
Gloucestershire GL56 OYG
01608 731 700
http://www.daylesfordorganic.com/scat/daylesfordfarmshop

Lodge Park
Aldsworth
Nr Cheltenham
Gloucestershire GL54 3PP
01451 844130 (Lodge Park)
01451 844257 (Estate office)
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-lodgeparksherborneestate

The Victoria Inn
Eastleach
Nr Cirencester
Gloucestershire GL7 3NQ
01367 850277
http://www.arkells.com/pubs_more2.php?id=663

Bibury Court
Bibury
Gloucestershire GL7 5NT
01285 740324
http://www.biburycourt.co.uk/

Barnsley House/The Village Pub
Barnsley
Cirencester GL7 5EET
01285 740 000
http://www.barnsleyhouse.com/
http://www.thevillagepub.co.uk/

Cotswolds

Blue 57

Posted on April 8, 2010

Lord and Lady Glebe, the lambs whose birth we witnessed a couple weekends ago, are now known as the gender appropriate Glebe sisters or the prosaic Blue 57. The latter sounds like I’m trying to sink your Battleship, but it’s just a reference to the spray painted number that now graces theirs and their mother’s sides so the shepherds can make sure they stay together in the pasture. Henry has managed to swing a trade with his boss so the Blue 57 trio join his flock and husband stays that much closer to realizing his dream of lamb chop liberation for the Glebe sisters.

We learned all this last night when we bumped into Henry at the local inn. There, over cider and red wine, a cunning plan was hatched to realize our dream of a pet sheep syndicate of which the Glebe sisters will be the inaugural members. We’ve identified a regular at the wine bar who has a few unused acres just out of town. It’s a perfect plan if we can convince the land owner, who I just happen to know is partial to the Ox House white…