How is it Friday? Bank holidays completely throw me. I was away for two days having a lovely time in the beautiful Cotswolds, came back, hung out with one of the children, who was here looking after the dogs, and now it’s nearly the weekend. (When do you stop calling the children ‘the children’? I assume never, since they are the children, but maybe it’ll sound odd when they’re 60? Mind you, I call my mother Mummy - not even ‘Mum’ - and I am 58).
The Cotswolds have become very busy. Twenty-odd years ago I rented a house in that neck of the woods for a while, and it all felt much sleepier and more relaxed. It certainly wasn’t glitzy. There was no Soho Farmhouse. Daylesford was in its infancy - we went sometimes to gawp in wonderment, but bought our food in more local, much smaller farm shops. Now every village has at least one extremely luxey boutique, at least one pretty fancy place to eat (sushi in Burford for £150 a head!), and many, many shiny people from London. I suppose they expect constant access to Londony things - someone I was talking to said, rather despairingly, ‘they think Gloucestershire should be more like Mayfair. They want to be on Mount Street, but here’.