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Cotswolds

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.

Cotswolds Walking

Walk for a Spring Day: Snowshill and Stanton

Posted on April 22, 2009

A reader of this blog could be forgiven for thinking my sole source of physical exertion in the Cotswolds is lifting a wine glass to my lips. But husband and I do make use of our bicycles or hiking boots most weekends, and so I thought I’d add the occasional entry covering a particularly good ramble or cycle route, starting with our figure of eight walk last Sunday from Snowshill to Stanton and back.

Distance: 8 miles (approximately)
Duration: If you are walking with your partner, allow half a day for this ramble. If your walking group consists of only women, you can slice off an hour thanks to your intuitive sense of and ability to ask for directions. If your walking group is all male, best not to make any plans for the rest of the day and do remember to bring a GPS enabled mobile phone.
Difficulty: Moderate with some steep sections, especially if you accidentally veer off the path

Snowshill is that rare thing in the Cotswolds, a village with a name that sounds as picturesque as it really is. Other Cotswolds villages are laden with less charming names. Upper and Lower Slaughter come to mind, as do Northleach, Eastleach, and Lechlade which together form a triumvirate evocative of leeches and lecherousness. And then there’s my favorite: Cold Slad. (I wonder how often the final “d” on the sign to Cold Slad has been spray painted into a “g” over the years, misleading countless men with a fetish for heartless sluts.)

1. We start where we intend to finish: the pub. After fortifying ourselves with a ploughman’s lunch at the Snowshill Arms, we headed left out of the pub and walked along the road past Snowshill Manor, now a National Trust property. I have not been inside yet but apparently the former owner was a compulsive shopper/collector and the Trust has preserved his hoarded assortment of bikes, clocks, costumes, toys, art, and other objects that struck his fancy as he left it. If you’ve started to fight with your partner over directions at this point in the walk, it may be best to cut your losses and just pay a visit to the Manor or the lavender farm further up the road.

2. Beyond the parking lot there is a stile and signpost for a public path on the left hand side of the road. Follow it through the sheep field and down into the valley. If it is spring, this is an excellent chance to coo about just how cute lambs are and just how thick and skittish they grow up to be. Cross the stream and follow the path up the other side of the valley until you reach a dirt road running parallel to the woods. From here you can look back across the valley and admire Snowshill and the Manor and, in the other direction, the top of Broadway Tower. Take a right along the dirt road, which will be the last time that day your partner and you agree on the route, and follow it along the woods until it starts to curve around to the left.

3. Here you will have some choices, the clearest of which would be to join the well delineated Cotswold Way just off to your right. You may find, however, that your partner would rather argue about whether or not it is necessary to cross a field of bulls in order to progress to Stanton, throwing his or her Ordnance Survey map to the ground and accusing you of being antagonistic in the process (not that I know anyone who has done this). Best just to smile calmly in the face of this sort of behaviour and wait for the tantrum to pass before starting to make slow but firm progress in the direction of the Cotswold Way (which yes, I know, is where you suggested you head all along). You’ll have a good stretch of tense silence along The Cotswolds Way, punctuated by the occasional outburst that causes other fellow ramblers to hang well back. This is ok as asking them for directions at this point would be perceived as further proof of your “antagonism.”

4. After a while you’ll reach a crossroads where, if you’re lucky, a pink nosed, fluffy lamb will have broken loose from the adjoining pasture. This will give your partner a chance to “rescue” it before it succeeds in strangling itself by headbutting the wire fencing in its futile attempts to get back to mama ewe. Your partner’s ensuing feelings of heroism will help disseminate any lingering resentment towards you for having a good sense of direction. Pointing out that any old fool could see where to go just by using Broadway Tower as a landmark is not advised at this juncture, as it would jeopardize your credibility when it came to influencing the decision to go right and continue on the Cotswold Way into Stanton.

5. This is a lovely leg of the journey, where near-tame, chocolate coloured cows and their calves swirl around you on the path. Careful though. In your state of bucolic bliss you may impulsively suggest a shortcut that takes you off the Cotswold Way, through some woods, and down a muddy, precipitous decline into Stanton. Don’t be alarmed when you end up by a house called Shenberrow, a name that happens to appear at a different place on the map, a place you are pretty sure you passed about ten minutes ago. The Ordnance Survey people throw these kind of red herrings in from time to time just to make sure you’re paying attention. You’ll soon know you’re in Stanton when you arrive at a little of triangle of a green with a ceremonial coach light hanging from a wooden post. The church is to the left, and the pub is to the right. Naturally, you should head right.

6. The Mount Inn does what it says on the tin and delivers panoramic views from its two patio areas. We had long been planning a visit as the landlords are transplants from an excellent inn, The Plough in Cold Aston, nearer to us. Sure enough, Pippa the so-friendly-and-enthusiastic-she’s-practically-American hostess, was there. It was evident from the familiar, cream-laden dishes spelled out in curlicue writing on the chalk board that her partner, the chef, was also there. We drank Diet Cokes on the shady back patio before heading up and out on the path just behind and to the left of the pub.

7. The route out is more efficient than the improvised route in, and within twenty minutes you’ll be back to the site of Operation Lamb Rescue. This will stir up good memories in your partner so that he or she is susceptible to your final route alteration (my, you’re brave) which takes you off the Cotswold Way via some National Trust signposted woods. Soon you’ll be in another sheep field, then head right on the road all the way back into Snowshill. The pub may yet to be reopened for evening service but check around back and the barmaid may just serve you a pint of SBA and a ginger beer to enjoy in the garden, as she did for us.

Cotswolds

Why I Love My Town

Posted on April 8, 2009

…because it’s the kind of place where if, like last night, you happen to be eating dinner out at the local inn and at 9pm realise you have no milk at home for coffee in the morning and the shop is shut and nothing will be open before you have to leave for work tomorrow, the waitress brings you a little ceramic jug of milk sealed with cling film and tell you to just bring the jug back whenever you have time because she’s not bothered and she doesn’t charge you anything for it.

The End

Cotswolds

Marmite Whirls and Farm Shops

Posted on April 3, 2009

Just when I think there is nothing new under the sun I get a surprise. The Cotswolds are like that. Any day now I am sure I will wake up and find the barren trees and hedges lining the lanes are overgrown with greenery and cottony May blossom. But already this week I have made two new discoveries.

The first was that I like Marmite. Or at least I found a foodstuff that contains Marmite that I like. The first time I tried Marmite was years ago, at breakfast with some Australian friends in Singapore where I was encouraged to spread it on my toast. This was followed promptly by an extended period of silent pleading with my gag reflex not to vomit on the dining table of these very nice people whose house I enjoyed staying at very much. In retrospect this might have been a bit of a harsh way to introduce me to Marmite, like giving someone their first taste of gin in a straight up martini rather than nestled in the loving arms of some Indian tonic with a slice of lime. This time the Marmite delivery was a bit more gin and tonic, spread as it was onto the buttery sides of some puff pastry and rolled up into a warm, savory pinwheel. For the first three or so I popped in my mouth I assumed I was eating some kind of cheese flavoured snack. A more observant person may have noted that the presumed cheese product was brown, but I had to be told I was eating a “Marmite whirl.” Imagine my surprise. First The Archers, now Marmite. I’ll be saying “blimey” in no time.

My second discovery of the week was the Abbey Home Farm Shop. I must have driven by it a million times, but Wednesday, stir-crazy from being indoors recuperating for the past week and a half (other than my Marmite eating Sunday lunch outing), I decided to stop in. The shop and café are at the end of a long narrow drive and it looked like someone dropped it whole from Topanga Canyon into the middle of a farm in the Cotswolds, from the Fair Trade coffee to the Indian print table cloths to the middle-aged, smiley waitress in pig tails and overalls. There is even a menu featuring multiple vegetarian dishes, which is quite a radical concept for this part of the world. In my delicate state I found it all very comforting and ordered up a banana milkshake with a broccoli and leek bake that I ate sitting outside on the wrap-around patio overlooking one of the farm’s fields. I was so taken I’ve booked us in for Easter Sunday lunch, for which I am afraid I will have to forsake the vegetarian options for the lamb roast they will be serving straight from their farm.

Cotswolds

Easter Comes Early

Posted on March 12, 2009

I was sure Saturday evening’s expedition to Toffdom’s Rural Headquarters, the Hunt Ball, was going to spoon feed me material for my next blog post. Surely it would be chock-a-block with eccentrics and their accompanying outlandish behavior, which I’ve grown to know and love in my year in the Cotswolds. I was wrong. The most outrageous thing I witnessed all night was a drunken nineteen year old who sucked face with her paramour on the dance floor for three consecutive songs. As husband is fond of saying, youth are so boring. We were home in bed by 1:30AM.

Well rested and hangover free, we made it to church the next morning for the first time this year. We were greeted by the usual suspects, six elderly ladies and one fifty-something man who surely attends in part out of civic duty to the golden girls of his village. The upside of a measly church population is everyone gets a job. Jean says Mattins, the lady who drives her Nissan Micra like a bat out of hell for the one block between her cottage and the church reads the Old Testament verse, the lady with the Danish accent the New Testament, the gent takes the offering and rings the bells, and Dorothy, in her orange pea coat, recites the Collect. This last one is my favourite. Dorothy’s prayer reads like an uber letter to Santa Claus, her requests ranging from a pony (“good health for the Queen”) to a trip to the moon (“peace on earth in our time, Lord”). I say this not to poke fun at her earnest and child-like approach, but rather in humble admiration of a person who has managed to retain these qualities after eighty years.

I on the other hand am totally godless. That’s the only way I can explain why Jean’s Lenten sermon made me think of the saga of our local Chinese takeaway, Dynasty. Jean was preaching about when Jesus had to prepare the disciples for the fact he was going to die. They responded with the textbook five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — not unlike my fellow villagers and I when faced with the recent shuttering of Dynasty. But then, last Thursday night, we had a bit of an early Easter miracle here in the Cotswolds. Husband, playing the unlikely herald, burst through the backdoor of the cottage asking if I wanted to hear some “fantastic news.” He was so jubilant I was sure that Inspector Closseau, his workplace nemesis, had been fired. But no, he brought good tidings that that the Dynasty woks are firing once again like a phoenix risen from the ashes. Just like that, Kung Pao Chicken Friday nights are back! I suspect Jean would fail to appreciate my loose interpretation of Easter theology, but it is nearly spring and I’ll take my themes of rebirth and renewal where I can find them.

Cotswolds

High Society

Posted on March 7, 2009

I woke up humming tunes from High Society, which husband and I went to see last night at the cinema in our local country house hotel. I’ve decided it edges out Love Actually as the best rom com ever, what with Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and Grace Kelly (in the best Grecian toga bathingsuit cover up EVER), not to mention the totally awesome mid-century patio furniture that features in most scenes except the ones in the library where a bar magically appears when you tug on a tome of Darwin. The movie is unfettered by political correctness allowing Grace Kelly’s character, Tracy Lord, to get plastered the night before her doomed wedding and snog both her ex-husband, played by Bing, and the paparazzi man, played by Frank. (As a trivia bonus I now also suspect I know where the porn star, Traci Lords, took inspiration for her name.)

Tonite is the Cotswold Hunt Ball and I fully expect, nay demand, all kinds of equally unpolitically correct and fabulous behaviour to be on display. I’ve procured a long evening dress with relative ease following my panic last weekend, thanks to a sale at Ghost. Undergarments have been trickier. Despite bragging about my Trinny and Susannah Miracle Pants in my last post, the truth is I bought an imitation “slimming pant” that was half the price. I tried on my dress yesterday and found to my horror that said girdle, while very effective at squashing in the right places, created just the merest hint of, gasp, back cleavage. As if the indignity of needing to purchase a “slimming pant” wasn’t enough. I was never very good at physics but I vaguely remember something about mass displacement—it’s got to go somewhere—so I guess the formation of a small ass on my upper back stands to reason. Looks like today’s agenda will feature a mad dash to the lingerie department at House of Fraser. That elegant pencil Grace Kelly never dealt with the challenges of back cleavage, but then again, she probably never went to the Hunt Ball either.

Cotswolds

Spring Is in the Air

Posted on March 1, 2009

Saturday the weather was mild enough to coax us on to our bikes for our inaugural ride of 2009. Snow drops are blooming and the daffodils are threatening to burst forth by next weekend. The hunt was out which would have been nice if we had seen it, but our timing was off and so it just meant lots more horse shit and cars on the road toting the binocular and camera slinging masses.

It’s a good thing we made the effort because unbeknownst to us it was Chris’s last day at the post office in G.P., which was our first stop on the bike ride. Chris runs a little cafe in the corner of the shop, and Saturday morning coffee and a paper there are a long standing Cotswold tradition for us. It was on her brown leather couch that looks out across the village green where, leafing through The Guardian, I found husband his current job, a fact I don’t mention given his disgruntled state over the continuing presence of Inspector Clouseau. Chris tried to soften the blow of her decision to leave — she said it had been on the cards ever since the post office hours were cut last year — with promises of bacon sandwiches from the new owner, but we were crushed. At least we got to say goodbye. And we’re bound to see her one Saturday enjoying a bacon sandwich since she still lives in the village.

At the end of our bike ride we stopped into the wine bar for a coffee where M. the barman enquired if we’d like to attend his hunt’s auction that evening, a last minute replacement for a couple who’d fallen ill. We didn’t know until we arrived at the town hall later that evening that entrepreneurial E. the bird plucker was his considerably younger date. I couldn’t help thinking this was bound to end in tears, but I was too distracted by the assembled company to let my judgements get the best of me. This included an Austrian count who is tall and pointy, as an Austrian count should be, and seemed to have donated every other lot in the auction. There was also a ginger haired man of indeterminate age who specialised in horse breeding data. He was like a Wall Street analyst of the horsey set, equines instead of equities.

When it came time to bid, husband came close on a lot for a day’s gate shutting, which I assume is a useful service when you ride horses across the vast plot of land that makes up your family’s estate and you don’t want to get off your horse continually to close gates. The lot didn’t specify where said gate shutting was to take place, and husband and M. thought it would be hilarious to have the donating family come up to London and spend the day closing front gates up and down our road. Husband bailed at £200 which left him with precisely that amount to purchase a life coaching session, exactly the kind of namby pamby, L.A. thing to ruin one’s reputation at an event like this, and the taint by association heaped on our host was exactly what husband was going for. It was very poor value indeed considering a week at a villa that sleeps fifteen in the Dordogne went for under a grand.

The true value of the evening came from E., who provided the information heretofore unknown to me that the hunt ball next Saturday was a floor length dress required kind of event. This sent me into a mad rush on Sunday during which I momentarily considered having my mother FedEx me an old bridesmaid dress, the only long dress I own, never mind the chiffon and rhinestone scattered flutter sleeves. Presented with this plan my mother, who just happened to be bruised and ace bandaged from her most recent bout of plastic surgery (neck and eyes touch up to her now nearing a decade old face lift), shrieked that said dress “looks like a sack” on me. Unlike my mother the only thing that will be giving me any kind of lift with my evening gown are my Trinny and Susannah Miracle Pants, the British equivalent of Spanx.

The last time I faced this kind of formal wear emergency imposed by the regulations of British society was two years ago when, two days shy of Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot, I happened to hear mention of the fact that a lady’s hat had to cover her entire head to enter the Royal Enclosure. The reasonably priced number I had settled on weeks ago, somewhere between a “fascinator” and a beret in scalp coverage, was on the cusp of unacceptable. On a frenzied death march stopping in every milliner within a mile radius of Oxford Street I parted ways with a considerable sum of money for what can only be described as a hot pink, highly feathered pimp hat. May my evening gown for the hunt ball be as fabulous.