Quaint Quaintness, With Extreme Quaintitude

So the other day my esteemed colleague and I went to the Cotswolds, which is like a really big soundstage backdrop for a period piece involving apple-cheeked girls in full skirts, ardent noble equestrians, and amusing rustics. However in real life it also includes cell phone towers and posh cars and Tory taxi drivers.

We went and stayed in the most Olde Englishe Pub/Inne ever called the Falkland Arms in a hamlet (seriously) called Great Tew. Great Tew and environs ranged from the quaint to the super-quaint to the uber-quaint and even - I exaggerate not - delving into the Meta-Quaint, which is like the sublime essence of all that is rolling green fields and sun-kissed golden sandstone.

The Falkland Arms took it's quaintness seriously and had the requisite enormous fireplace and mugs hanging from low beams. The food was delicious (especially the duck), as was the selection of beers, but the most wonderful part of the inn was the four-poster bed with bed curtains in room #4. It was like a fort! A fort with big tapestry pillows! And a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, framed by the beautiful wooden posts. My esteemed colleague and I were most delighted with this fort-bed (which could easily have doubled as a space-ship).

The next morning, after a gigantic breakfast with many fried components, we decided to take a long ramble through the fields and farms to see the Rollright Stones, which apparently are the third coolest standing stones and stone circle in England, after Stonehenge and Avebury. (Kip: Napoleon, like anyone can even know that.)

I had thought of taking a taxi to Chipping Norton, the largish village where we'd gotten off the bus from Fodrox, but since we had an Ordinance Survey map (the second coolest thing in the world, after the fort bed), and the sun was shining in the azure sky, my esteemed colleague proposed that we walk the whole way there. We estimated it to be about 6 or 7 miles. However, when we mentioned that we were thinking of walking to the Stones to any of the locals they looked at us as though we were mad. "That's a really long way away . . . " they said. Even the taxi driver from Chipping Norton admonished us from attempting the long trek to the Stones on foot - even though they're only about 2 miles away on well-marked foot- and bridle-paths. I guess no one walks for fun out in the country. I routinely walk three miles a day in the city (largely to delay getting to lab).

It took us only a few hours to get from Great Tew to the stones, even with the meandering country lanes and the crossing of fields and the occasional hacking way through hedgerow. In England, ramblers have the right to roam, which means that random people can just tromp carefree across other people's yards . . . I explained to my more pacific companion that in America, the farmers would probably shoot us. I felt kind of strange galumphing across peoples' fields like that (me in my leather jacket and he with a laptop bag slung over his shoulder). I then sang a rousing chorus of "This land is my land" as I learned it in second grade: "This land is my land/It isn't your land/If you step on it/I'll shoot your head off/I have a shotgun/And you don't have one/This land is private property". My esteemed colleague countered with a brilliantly macabre kids' song about the sinking of the Titanic, which has been in my head all morning.

The walking was remarkably simple, and the map included the names of farms and the outlines of buildings as well as roads, paths, copses, and hedgerows. We walked along a very straight Roman road for a while (there was a ruined Roman villa nearby) and discussed the Roman occupation and nationalism. There were many pheasants, some of whom were being shot at. Pheasants waddle around and flap noisily when you go near them, like particularly dim and sun-addled tourists on a coach trip. In addition to pheasants there were many sheep who stared at us baa-ing interlopers, slightly puzzled, for a moment before returning to the business of grass chomping.

Anyway, it was all tremendously quaint and pastoral, with many black Labs bounding around, and I'd love to have a country house like that, with the golden sandstone and the sheep and the silage pits - so long as I could return to the city. Some of those wee towns haven't even got a pub. Great Rollright, for example, has got a Post Office shop and a Farm Shop, whose tea room attracts all the old grannies of the area at lunch time, but we did not see a single beer dispensary! Which is just dangerous, quite frankly, as it encourages drunk driving.

Have I mentioned that Fodrox is full - full - of Americans? There is nothing more cringe-inducing than the mutated accents of (other) Americans in England. I must sound like such a twat . . . but I swear, I am not doing it on purpose. Everyone else is just being affected but not me!

Have been blissfully not following current events, except as mentioned by my esteemed colleague (Pakistan beat England at cricket) and have completely neglected my work. Guilty? I am not. Sometimes there are more important things to attend to than politics and career, such as very long walks and healing conversations.

P.S. Fun fact: "Chipping" means "cheapening", as in bartering at a market. So Chipping Norton, Chipping Clapham, etc, are market towns.