Slaughters, Scarves, and a Masquerade
Updated: 2 days ago
There is a particular kind of late-December lull — the days between Christmas and New Year that don’t quite belong to either — where you finally sit down and realise you haven’t written anything since September. The reason becomes apparent the moment you start listing what’s happened. So: October to now, properly, before the year actually closes and I lose the thread of it entirely.
October: The Cotswolds
A weekend in the Cotswolds in October, which Richard and I had been meaning to do for the better part of three years. We based ourselves near Oddington and walked over to the Slaughters — Lower Slaughter, Upper Slaughter, and Bourton-on-the-Water — over two days. The Cotswolds in October is the Cotswolds at its best: the honey-coloured stone, the light going warm and low by four in the afternoon, the particular quiet of a village that has been a village for a very long time and is settled about it.
We stopped at The Slaughters Country Inn for lunch, which is a beautiful old building with good grounds and the kind of menu that rewards having walked to it. I also noticed, with some pleasure, a sign in the village awarding Lower Slaughter the Bledisloe Cup for ‘Best Kept Village in Rural England’ — which is quite something given that its namesake in New Zealand is contested annually between Australia and the All Blacks. I found this deeply satisfying. The village was, it must be said, immaculate.
We also drove to Blenheim Palace, which I had somehow never been to. The grounds alone are worth the visit. Gemma, who had come for the weekend in the studied way of someone doing their parents a favour, fell asleep on the way home. She is seventeen and she spent the walk through Oddington telling me about university applications with the focused energy of someone who has thought about this carefully and requires me to confirm that the thinking is correct, which it was. I confirmed it. She fell asleep. I considered this a successful weekend.
November: Twickenham
Gemma and I went to Twickenham in November for the All Blacks against the Barbarians. Richard was working — inevitably, frustratingly, and with apologies that I received with the equanimity of someone who has been receiving these particular apologies for twenty years. His loss.
The match was excellent. The company in our seating area was initially more mixed. The large men to our left clocked Gemma — seventeen, slight, in an All Blacks scarf — and made the natural assumption. One of them began explaining, with genuine goodwill, what a ruck was. Gemma let him finish. Then she explained, politely and with considerable technical precision, why the referee had made the wrong call on the previous one. By half time they were asking her for her assessment of New Zealand’s lineout. By the end of the game she was the authority for our entire section. She accepted this with the calm of someone who was not surprised.
There is a specific pride that comes from watching your daughter forensically dismantle a patronising assumption while remaining entirely pleasant about it. I filed it away next to the feijoa negotiation of 2007 and the Seven Sisters chalk geology of 2015.
We had dinner and drinks at the Orange Tree in Richmond afterwards. A very good evening, all told.
Work: Chelmsford, Ongoing
The Chelmsford development has been all-consuming since the autumn. We’re on site with Countryside Properties at Beaulieu — a large mixed-use development, which by December was in the fitout phase for the residential blocks, with the retail anchor, a Sainsbury’s, due to follow in the new year. The snagging list is substantial. Practical completion is imminent in the way that practical completion is always imminent and then moves two weeks to the right.
The commute is, frankly, unrelenting. Chelmsford from where I am involves an early departure and a late return, and it is not uncommon for me to fall asleep on the Friday evening train. I wake up at the right station, which I’m taking as evidence that the body develops its own contingency planning. I am treating this as a professional development.
It has also meant that the small rituals of looking after myself have become non-negotiable rather than optional, which I didn’t expect to write a paragraph about but apparently am. I found a colourist in Horsham this autumn — Maria, who I will be loyal to for the rest of my natural life after eleven years of various people doing various unwanted things to my hair — and I now block out a Saturday morning every six weeks with the seriousness I used to reserve for client meetings. There is also a nail place near the station I’ve started going to before anything that requires me to look like I have my life together, which is roughly twice a month at the moment. None of this feels indulgent. It feels closer to maintenance. I have come to think of myself, post-forty, as a piece of infrastructure requiring a planned maintenance schedule, which is either a healthy reframe or evidence that I have spent too long around asset management reports. Possibly both.
There is also a black wool coat in John Lewis that I have now walked past, paused in front of, and walked on from approximately nine times since October. I am building a case for it. The case is not yet complete.
The Other Thing
Richard and I have started, properly, talking about buying.
We have been in the Horsham house considerably longer than either of us expected to be — it was meant to be a stopgap while we found our feet, and five years later it is still the place we come back to, comfortable in the way rented places become comfortable once you’ve stopped treating them as temporary. But it isn’t ours, and at some point in the last year that started to matter in a way it hadn’t before. Possibly it’s Gemma’s A-levels looming and the sense that the next chapter of the house needs to be a different one. Possibly it’s simply that we’re the age where you stop renting on principle and start renting because you haven’t yet done the thing you mean to do.
We had a conversation in October, over a bottle of wine that was probably responsible for the initial burst of enthusiasm, about where. Not Horsham again — not because we don’t love it, but because five years of going back to Mum and Dad’s for Sunday lunch has made us both want our own version of somewhere, not a return to somewhere familiar. Richard has a theory about Herne Hill, which involves the trains into the City being good, the area being green in the way he likes without being full of the kind of people he finds exhausting, and a market he discovered on a work trip years ago that apparently sold him on the whole postcode in one Sunday morning. There is also an annual Country Show in the local park.
We went to see two places in November. Both were wrong in instructive ways — one had a kitchen that made me feel claustrophobic just standing in the doorway, the other had a garden so good that we spent the entire viewing in it and didn’t properly look at the house. I don’t think either of us thought either one was right, but the process of looking, even at the wrong places, has been clarifying. I now know what I want in a way I didn’t before we started, which I understand is apparently the entire point of house hunting and which nobody tells you in advance because it would save considerable time.
Nothing to report yet. But it’s started, and it feels different to talking about it in the abstract, the way most things do once you’ve actually put your coat on and gone to look.
December: Three Things
The first: an afternoon off in early December, which I spent on the Southbank with a camera. The light in London in December, on the rare days it cooperates, is extraordinary — low and gold off the river, the bridges catching it at angles that change by the minute. I came back with rather a lot of photographs and a renewed appreciation for what this city does when it remembers it’s beautiful. I recommend it as an activity to anyone who has been staring at a snagging list for too long.
The second: the work Christmas party at the Savoy. A Masquerade, which meant I retrieved from storage a Venetian mask that Richard and I had bought in Venice on a trip roughly twenty years ago — early in our marriage, before New Zealand, when we were the kind of people who went to Venice for long weekends. The mask survived storage. I did not survive the champagne with quite the same dignity. It was an excellent party. I lost the mask at some point in the second half of the evening and have made my peace with this. I’d spent the morning out on site in Chelmsford, in fresh snow, and had the foresight to book a corporate rate at the hotel, which turned out to be an excellent decision given that it was freezing and had been a very long day. The sore head the next morning was intense but contextually appropriate.
The third: Christmas itself, which was quiet. Richard has been deep in a work stretch that has been going since November, and we had a gentle, low-key few days at home that suited both of us more than I’d expected. So for the last few days, Gemma and I have been in London on a girls’ trip — a boutique hotel in Mayfair, a bit of purposeless wandering and photography, some shopping. We went to the Newport Street Gallery to see Dan Colen’s Sweet Liberty exhibition, which was exactly the right amount of fun for a gallery visit — enormous, colourful, slightly chaotic, and producing the specific pleasure of standing in front of something absurd and finding yourself delighted by it. Gemma approved. She is harder to delight than she used to be, so I note this.
So: a Cotswolds village with an unlikely trophy, a Twickenham education delivered by my own daughter, a great deal of Chelmsford, a colourist I intend to keep for life, a coat I haven’t bought yet, two viewings that taught me what I want without giving it to me, a Venetian mask I’m not entirely sure where I left, and a quiet Christmas that suited everyone.
Two days left of the year. Onwards into 2018 — there’s a lot already in the diary, Hamburg and Auckland among them, and the small matter of turning forty-three. Next post.
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