Monday, March 12
We had a rather tiring drive from Heathrow airport where we picked up our car. We were fine while on the highway, but then when we had to navigate the town roads, things slowed down to a 5 mph crawl. I couldn't really figure out where the problem was because we never saw any road repairs or accidents or even detours (called "diversion" here). None the less, we had pretty slow going for what seemed like an hour.
We eventually arrived at our cottage in Upper Slaughter later in the afternoon. This is one of the rentals where the owner has left the key, so it didn't really matter when we arrived: there would not be anyone waiting for us to arrive. After settling in, we found our way to the Tesco about four miles away in Stow-in-the-Wold. Leave it to the Brits to have such unusual town names!
Tuesday, March 13
Our son, Jared, and his wife Evelyn arrived today for a two week stay in England, partly with us and partly to see some of the country. They had an even longer trip to get to the cottage than we did, with traffic backed up at the same places, but just longer backups.
We did not plan to do anything in particular on this day, not knowing when they might arrive. Not every day has to be filled with sightseeing. In fact, I rather enjoy the occasional day when we don't do much of anything. That is one of the reasons that I wanted to stay in one rental for an extended period of time. We will be here in our cottage for nearly four weeks, time enough to find our way around and feel comfortable here before moving on to a new place to get accustomed to.
This cottage is plenty spacious for the four of us. It has two bedrooms and a full bath upstairs and one bedroom and a full bath downstairs, plus a big-enough kitchen and a comfortable sitting room.
The little complex of cottages was rebuilt from the original (probably they had fallen into disuse and, therefore, disrepair) in 1906 by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. In English architecture, Lutyens is considered to be the late Victorian equivalent of Christopher Wren of the early 18th century. He was the chief architect for the building of New Delhi.
(New Delhi was constructed from the ground up when the capital was moved from old Delhi. The cornerstone to the new city was laid in 1911 and the original buildings were completed by 1935, after Lutyen's death.)
The whole village of Upper Slaughter, and also Lower Slaughter, is composed of buildings that look like this, which is our view from our front door.
These cottages would have originally been built as housing for the workers and tenant farmers connected to the manor. In fact, this entire tiny village would have been built to support the manor.
At the end of our road, a few hundred feet away, the road ends for regular vehicular traffic because there is a ford to cross. The footbridge allows pedestrian traffic and horses with wagons could get through easily, but cars are a no-go. You can't really see the ford from this angle, but it is just to the right of the tree and just before the footbridge.
This is such a typical scene of the Cotswolds that it could be used as part of a costume drama set. Can't you just picture Judy Dench in a period costume walking over the footbridge with her market basket in hand?
When the iconic British phone booths were no longer needed, a lot of them were repurposed to house defibrillators. This is the one opposite our sitting room window.
On the first morning of our stay here, I saw a male pheasant walking down the center of the road just in front of the call box. Naturally, I did not have my camera ready.
Wednesday, March 14
Wednesday turned out to be a rather cold day and we had little incentive to do anything that required us to be outside. However, we did go to Stratford-upon-Avon for a play. We saw a really awful production of "The Duchess of Malfi" at the small, Swan Theater, which is the older part of the building where the Royal Shakespeare Company has its home.
This is the whole theater complex, which to my eyes looks like a repurposed industrial building instead of the purpose-built building that it is.
Thursday, March 15
Time for a country walk. There is a walking path just about everywhere one looks, one of which goes past our cottage. We decided to all go for a walk that promised to be less than a mile in each direction, thinking that it would be mild.
Well. We started out just fine, the weather was clear enough to not threaten rain or too much wind. There had been snow here for the past two weeks with some still on the ground, and then we had some light showers. Needless to say, we had some tough slogging through the muck in the path. Oh, and one more thing: there was the last day of the hunt season the day before and they had used this combination walking path/bridle path. The pathway goes through a sheep pasture with manure piles here and there. The horses had dropped their own manure as they went along and stirred the whole thing up with their hooves. Then there was the general dampness of early spring.
Oh boy, did we have muck. None of us had packed big room-hogging Wellies, so we made our way through in our shoes. Yuck.
We got to the road and quickly realized that we had gone the wrong way from the beginning! There was nothing to do, really, but to return the same way that we came. As usual, the way back seemed shorter than the way out.
We were all rather happy to be back to the cottage. I banned the shoes from the house until they were cleaned off. I brought out a brush and many pitchers of water in an attempt to clean them. We did a fairly good job and brought them in to put on the hearth (no fire in the fireplace, though).
It is a good thing that we are not expected to have some level of productivity on this trip, because we would fail that test. No matter.
Friday, March 16
We often don't go out in the morning, what with late sleeping, leisurely breakfasts, catching up on email and the news (sometimes I wish that I had skipped that part). So, after lunch, we venture out to some place that we haven't seen before or that we haven't been to in a long while.
Bourton-on-the-Water is one of those places. The last time that we were there was in 1985 when our sons were elementary/junior high school age.
It is one of those little villages that would be ever so charming if only the flocks of tourists would stay away. Of course, if there were no tourists going there, the town would fall into disuse, the economic base would dry up and the housing stock would start to look a bit scruffy.
As it is, the locals put up with tourists because they keep the village alive. This row of oh-so-typical Cotswold attached houses is mostly "holiday lets" nowadays. Even in this shoulder of the shoulder season, there were quite a lot of tourists strolling around town on this blustery day, but none in my photo because I always patiently wait for everyone to move on so that I can have a people-free postcard photo.
The plan for the afternoon was that we would all go to the village, have some time to stroll around, and then we would go different ways. Jared and Evelyn would walk back to the cottage through the countryside on one of the many walking paths. Larry and I would drive back to the cottage and maybe stop at a grocery store on the way and pick up some scones to have later in the day with some tea. Alas, before we got no more than ten minutes out of town, the rain started coming down quite seriously. I wasn't quite sure what to do next, but the walk for Jared and Evelyn was about three miles and I really thought that to be too far to walk in the rain.
My judgment told me to turn around and go back to pick them up. I figured that we would probably see them along the road on the way out of the village. They had stopped at the miniature village in town and therefore were not far along the route, making it easy to spot them. They seemed a bit glad to hop in and ride the way home. Not having a UK SIM card, they could not call us, so their plan had been to duck into a pub and wait it out.
We got quite a bit of rain, but being tucked into the cottage with a cup of tea made it not such a bad afternoon.
Saturday, March 17
St. Patrick's Day today. I remember when I visited England in the mid-90's, I happened to be here for a couple of weeks in March, including St. Patrick's Day. There was still at that time (maybe even now, but I don't know) a deep unrest between the English and the Irish. It was not far off from the "troubles" in Ireland, at least in the mind anyway.
I was in London and I was quite concerned about any disruptions during the day. I had purchased tickets to a concert at St. Martin-in-the-Field, which is just across the street from Trafalgar Square that evening and I wasn't sure if it would be safe to go or not. It turned out that at that time, St. Patrick's Day was a total non-event. But, now, all these years later, it seems that St. Patrick's Day is observed here in much the same style as in the US; not with parades, but with a lot of beer being consumed. We, however, were experiencing a lousy day of extremely cold, windy weather, so we stayed in the entire day. It was a good time to play Scrabble. (I won!)
Sunday, March 18
We can't just stay in the cottage for our whole time here, so we decided to go out for lunch at a brewery in Hook Norton.
On the way, we stopped to see the Rollright Stones, a very modest ring of stones from prehistoric times. This ring will never overshadow Stonehenge!
Again, the cold wind kept us from really wanting to spend much time there. So, on to the brewery.
We skipped the official tour because it seemed a bit pricey and simply went to their little museum on the history of their company and its beer making process. But first, lunch.
Not a bad way to spend an otherwise lousy Sunday afternoon.
Monday, March 19
After lunch, we had a nice drive through the countryside on our way back to Stratford-upon-Avon for an evening show.
We saw the signs for the Broadway Tower, which is apparently thought to be iconic because it is featured on the brochures for the Cotswolds. Though it features a crenalated top, it was not built as a defensive structure, but as a "folly"; one of those useless structures built strictly for the enjoyment of its owner. This one apparently had some living areas in it because William Morris (remember him?) spent some summers living there.
It was a bitterly cold day, with the wind at the top of this hill just piercing our clothing. By the time that we had climbed up the hill, I was too cold to even think of climbing up the stairs to tour the tower, so I took it on faith that there was something interesting to see. I was just happy that there was a gift shop that was open where I could get a few precious minutes of warmth (well, sort of warmth) until facing the wind again.
Then, we made a slight detour to walk through the center of Chipping Camden. Nothing has changed in a few hundred years: just the names on the shops. Chipping Camden is a market town. I doubt that the traveling market stops here anymore in modern times, but in centuries past having a market day made a town an important town for commerce. In the center of town is the ancient sheep market with its rough, uneven stones on the floor. The drainage ditches coming out of the market makes me think that not only was wool bought and sold there, but also some butchering perhaps. Or, maybe the drainage ditches were simply to drain off the rain water.
After spending some time in lovely Chipping Camden, we drove to Stratford for the second time in a week. This time we arrived in daylight because we were attending a director's talk before the performance.
We were greeted by these swans which are ever hopeful that the passing tourists will feed them, so they queue up along the water's edge looking for handouts.
The play was Macbeth. I've seen many iterations of Macbeth over the years. This was not one of the better ones.
It was interesting to listen to the director's vision of the play, but I never would have connected her thoughts with the performance. Her vision might have been clear in her head, but it didn't translate very well. It was done in modern dress, which in itself is fine, but I didn't care for the commando style costumes for the play's heavies. And, really, why did the director think that the three witches could be represented by children? I didn't get that part at all. Not to mention, that children are hard to hear, even when miked, because their voices are pitched so high.
It's nice to see Shakespeare at Stratford, but I do expect a high level of performance and interpretation.
After the Duchess of Malfi last week and Macbeth this week, I wish that we were going to be around a little later to see "Merry Wives of Windsor" because I could use a little bit of levity. I've had enough of murder most foul.
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