Subject: Worst place in the world
From Michael Morris Date: 26/10 2.48
To:
Cc:
Hi Derek,
Just been reading latest book by A. A. Gill – you know, The Sunday Times restaurant critic who seems to have a view on everything from fried bread to social psychology. It's called The Angry Island. He says he can't think what would induce anybody to visit Stow for pleasure, which he reckons is 'the worst place in the world'.
[If you're of a delicate disposition when it comes to the use of language, you might want to skip the rest of Mike's email.]
Gill seems to be quite worked up about it. He says your beloved Stow is 'catastrophically ghastly' because of its 'steepling piss-yellow vanity.' His final condemnation of the place is that you Stowites think it's the 'honey-dipped bollocks'.
Best as ever
Mike
I read it twice, then look up the word 'steepling' in the Oxford English Dictionary and it doesn't exist. Nor does the verb 'to steeple'. Of course I've no objection to people inventing new words. A. A. Gill might be trying to say that vanity in Stow reaches the same heights as the steeples on its buildings. But there aren't any steeples in Stow. The nearest we've got are some little knobbly turrets on each corner of the church tower, and a grubby, elongated dovecote affair on the roof of St Edward's Hall in the Square.
I'm wondering if he's got us mixed up with some other Stow. There are several scattered around rural England. Still he does say 'Stow-on-the-Wold'. That's pretty definitive. On the other hand, it could be a misprint. Perhaps he meant 'stippling', like that kind of dotty paint effect. Or maybe he intended to say 'stripping', meaning we're all so vain we show off our bodies at the drop of a hat (less likely, probably, since 40 per cent of Stow's population is retired).
But who am I to object to an occasional linguistic imprecision? It doesn't undermine the main thrust of Mr Gill's argument. Because the idea that Stow is a world leader in something – the worst place in the world – is cheering. It means that Stowites can hold their heads high alongside the citizens of Jericho on the West Bank of the Jordan (the most low-lying city in the world), of Tromsø in Norway (the world's most northerly town), and of Vanuatu (the alleged happiest country on the planet). And these superlatives are not to be dismissed lightly.
When Maggie gets home, she's full of what a busy day she's had cladding the more fashionable bodies of the over-forties women of north Gloucestershire. 'Life moves on,' she says, 'Life moves on,' sipping her Pinot Grigio and tucking her feet under her.
'You're right,' I say. 'How about I line up some other places for us to go and look at?'
'Good thinking,' she says and turns on the Six O'clock News.
What the bid for Sunny's burgage has taught us is that one way to get a home filled with characterful sunshine is to find a derelict old building and do it up. What hours of googling that evening also tell us is that we're turning up late at this particular party. Everybody else who wants to create their own grand design has already snapped up all the tumbled down barns and crumbly old chapels with a Cotswold address. But we do stumble on an estate agent's ad for a plot of land for sale with building permission in the middle of Shipston on-Stour, over the border into Warwickshire. It's the planning consent that makes land like this as rare as rabbits' eggs. And you never know, it might have some abandoned architectural treasure lurking in a corner like Sunny's burgage did. Shipston also has far fewer planning restrictions than Stow and we could just about build whatever we wanted there.
Maggie has a day off the next day, so, eager-eyed, we drive north up the Fosse Way till 10 miles on from Stow we turn right at ANTIQUE PINE AND LOVELY THINGS closely followed by SHIPSTON-ON STOUR HISTORIC MARKET TOWN.
'Ah, Shipston's not a village then,' I observe.
'Well, Stow probably isn't either,' replies Maggie, 'if you're going by size.'
'That's not right,' I insist. 'Stow's a village by two definitions. In the first place, government grants to villages are only given to places with populations less than 3,000. Chris told me that.' Chris is an old school friend of mine who's doing a late-career doctoral thesis on rural government. 'Stow's population is 2,800. And as well, I reckon that a place feels like a village if agriculture straggles into its middle. And there's that working farmhouse and barn with chickens clucking about at the top end of Parson's Corner.'
There's no time for further debate because we're hitting the outskirts of Shipston. We pass through an estate of red-brick houses that, quite frankly, could just as well be in Wigan or Wembley as rural Warwickshire. Still, once we've parked, the middle of the town comes over quite quaint (Lark Rise alert!): V R 1872 POLICE STATION and 1715 ORIGINAL BELL INN say the house plaques. Maggie spots a Georgian mansion on the edge of the Square, or rather she says, 'Look at those eight-foot-high windows.' But it's not for sale and we know it'd say 'Reserved for multi-millionaires' if it were, so we move on to look at the plot for sale, up the top of Sheep Street.
Well, it's a bit of land. What more can you say? Smallish, and an inconvenient triangular shape. It appears to be a spare piece of next door's garden. Its location is outside the quaint zone, on the edge of the Wigan-Wembley housing estate.
'Plan B?' Maggie suggests.
'Or maybe around Plan X,' I reply. She nods, and we head back to the car and the chase for our next quarry.
This is 5 miles away, across the other side of the Fosse Way, in the village of Aston Magna. The house we're going to look at is advertised on the estate agent's website as a converted forge, which would 'benefit from some investment in restoration.' We turn off just north of Moreton-in-Marsh and after a few hundred yards, the zigzaggy road becomes single track with a bony-looking thorn hedge on each side that's been scalped to a uniform height by a tractor-mounted cutter.
I've just spotted what looks like a chunky, square water tower a few hundred yards beyond the approaching curve, when suddenly my windscreen's filled with the front of an oncoming Land Rover. I swerve left, shout a word beginning with 'F' or 'S' – I can't remember which – while our front wheel skids on the muddy grass, and hawthorn branches make that dreaded scratchy noise on the car's side as the Land Rover's trailer rattles past, its speed undiminished.
The good news is that the car and the two of us are in much the same state of repair as before. Less heartening is the sight of the rear wheels, one of which is up to its rim in a hole.
Maggie moves over to the driving seat while I heave at the back bumper, until after fifteen minutes of whining (from the wheel, not me), of dirt being fired at my jeans, and of ripe country language, we jolt forward (me and the car). I leap into the passenger seat, and we're soon parking by the water tower.
It's still half an hour till we're due to meet the estate agent, so we decide to explore the village. The water tower is surrounded by huge leylandii trees (the sort that provoke neighbours to shoot each other in Norfolk). But through the thin bits at the bottom we can make out half a dozen grey-green tombstones.
We've just started to put on puzzled looks, when we hear a voice say, 'It's a church.' We turn to see a woman across the road grabbing the collar of her Labrador as it tries to climb over somebody's front gate. 'Or rather it used to be,' she adds, as the dog, tongue-lolloping, gives up on the gate and tugs her towards us. 'It's been a private house for the past fifteen years.'
'Gosh,' says Maggie. 'I don't think I'd go much on dead bodies buried under my azaleas.'
The woman pulls an ambiguous face, and says, 'They've got nice views from the top of the tower.'
'So is there another church in the village?' I ask.
'Not any more,' she replies and drags the panting Lab off towards a nearby stile. Neither Maggie nor I are church-goers. Well, not for the religion anyway. I love them as pieces of living history. This one's obviously Victorian, of the waterworks school of architecture. Hence my mistake.
Aston Magna, it turns out, is set on the sid
e of a hill. We walk up through new houses – posh yellow stone ones on the left, brick affordables on the right. We cross a bridge, and as we lean over the parapet expecting to see a little river bubbling past beneath, there's a sudden roar and a loud drumming, as a train races through the cutting below us.
The railway divides the village in two, and we now enter the part where lots of biggish houses are called 'The Old Something'. A terrace of cottages then fronts straight onto the street. There's no post office. No shop. The only concession to convenience is a bus shelter, made chiefly of dark blue plywood. A brass plaque inside announces:
Parish Council
A reward of one hundred pounds will be offered
to any person giving information resulting in a
conviction for damage to Council property.
The Council will hold parents responsible for the actions of their children. April 2002.
The bus shelter is undamaged. Is that because:
a) £100 is enough to lure the majority of Aston-Magnians into spying on their neighbours?
b) Parents here, unlike in the rest of the Western world, exercise total control over their children? Or
c) The bus shelter is not smart enough to be worth vandalising anyway?
Next to the plaque is a timetable. There are two buses a week to Cheltenham, and another two a week, on the Hedgehog Community Service, to Moreton.
The Old Forge, the place we've come to look at, is at the top of a little lane next to a farm. The agent is standing by his car, clipboard with safety catch off. We immediately see that the building has three floor to-ceiling windows. 'It has three floor-to-ceiling windows,' says the agent, reading from his brief. So Maggie's interested. It's also got a couple of oak beams. 'It's got oak beams,' says the agent pointing at the oak beams.
It's run-down. Plaster peeling. Beat-up Formica kitchen. We remain silent on these matters, not wishing to challenge the descriptive powers of the agent further, until we're in the car home.
'I don't mind the state it's in,' says Maggie, 'because we'd want to do things to the inside anyway. The kitchen for instance's totally in the wrong place.' Maggie has a thing about the one who's cooking – which can be either of us – not being isolated from guests who might be having a pre-lunch chat for instance about fiscal deficits or whether Danish bacon beats Gloucestershire Old Spot. And she's convinced me on this score.
'Hmm,' I reply, 'I agree. It's more the village that I'm wondering about.'
'Yes,' Maggie agrees. 'It's peaceful enough, but…' She pauses.
And I leap in, '… you could drive through it and not notice it was there.'
That night, I lie awake, getting all worked up again about A. A. Gill's rant against Stow, and wondering whether I'm biased against Shipston-on-Stour and Aston Magna. I suppose they're nice enough places – in their own way. But they've not got Stow's uniqueness. What can Shipston boast that no other place on the planet has got? And you can search the Guinness Book of Records all you like, and you won't find the name 'Aston Magna' in its pages. No, Stow has caché – as well as four bookshops, two delis, two bakeries, an organic food store, a butcher's, a shop that sells signed lithographs by Picasso and Matisse, not to mention some of the best women's fashion boutiques in the south Midlands. I suppose this could just be the basis of a list of my favourite things. But these, plus the ability to go to a party and tell people, 'We live in the worst place in the world,' (you won't see their eyes glaze over, I promise) finally sends me off to sleep in a contented frame of mind.
CHAPTER 7
HOGSTHORPE – TWINNED
WITH PARIS
'I've been thinking about what Ralph said,' I announce. 'This thing about me being denied any sort of childhood paradise.' Nothing's turning up in Stow to tempt us to consider it as the future Taylor-Cox abode, and I'm getting unsettled again.
'I'd love to know what's happening deep inside your head,' says Maggie. 'Ralph's obviously stirred up some bit of grit that's disturbing your dreams.'
'Well, here's the thing,' I say. 'There was a little paradise in my childhood. Did I ever tell you…' (Maggie and I have been together for only seven years so there are often bits of our lives that remain undescribed) '… that when I was a kid, my grandma and granddad owned a tiny little cottage up near the coast in Lincolnshire, and we used to go there every summer for a couple of weeks.'
'Ah, a property-owning, trade union mine-workers' leader,' she jests.
'No, no. Not my dad's father. This was my mum's dad, the musician.'
Grandpa Jo Kirkham had in fact also started out as a miner. He went down the pit at the age of ten. It was illegal to employ children until they were thirteen, but with a nod and a wink on both sides, the law was widely flouted. Then, when he was in his twenties, at the end of nine hours hewing coal, he started to go to night school, and to take piano lessons, and somehow by the time he was twenty-seven he got himself a job above ground. In his thirties, he became an Associate of the London College of Music. A hundred years ago, for an ill-educated coal miner, this was an achievement that would rank these days alongside… well it's difficult to imagine what it would rank alongside now. Today we're taught to believe anybody can become Prime Minister or win the Nobel Peace Prize, even if we don't manage it ourselves. In Granddad's day, to leave school at ten, work seventeen years down the pit and then do what he did, was out of the question, an impossibility. But he did it.
'Oh, yes,' says Maggie. 'I remember now. It's an incredible story.'
'Well, that's right. He and my grandma somehow managed to find enough money to buy this little house in Lincolnshire, as a summer holiday getaway for the family, before holiday getaways were invented for ordinary people. Family legend was that they paid £100 for the place. I remember it and the village like it was last week. It was paradise. I used to look forward to it so much that I used to start packing my suitcase weeks and weeks before we set off.'
'Ahhh,' said Maggie in the soppy tone grannies use when their newborn grandchild throws up for the first time.
I harrumph and continue. 'I was thinking we might go and take a look at the old place. I've not been back there since I was about eleven.'
She jerks her head back with a theatrical startle. 'You're not suggesting we find a place to live two hundred miles away in the frozen wastes of Lincolnshire, are you?'
'No, no. We've been promising ourselves a weekend away, and I'm curious.'
'About what exactly?'
'About what makes this village so idyllic.'
'But it'll have changed. And you've changed since you were eleven. A bit anyway.'
'I know. But, look on it as a piece of psychological and social research. How have we both – me and the village – altered?' I pride myself on knowing how to hook Maggie in. Before she became a fashion retailer, she took a Master's degree in social science.
She shrugs her eyebrows. 'OK, why not. So what is this little haven of peace and perfection called?'
'Hogsthorpe.'
'What!?'
'Hogsthorpe.'
'Well, it's certainly not Lark Rise or Candleford.'
'Exactly. Now you see my point.'
Five days later, as we drone along in a speeding convoy of Eddie Stobart artics and whizzy, lane-swapping Minis, M1 northbound with Hogsthorpe in our sights, Maggie asks, 'So tell me what you remember about Hogsthorn.'
'Hogsthorpe. Hogsthorpe,' I twitch, irritated that its name is not now as fixed as Athens or Tokyo. '"Thorpe" is Old Danish for village. You'll see when we get up there, lots of the villages end either in "thorpe" or "-by".'
'What do you mean "BI"?' she asks.
'"-by" like in Grimsby. This is Viking territory where we're going. Hogsthorpe is a tiny village with one little main street with a fourteenth-century church – I remember its stubby tower looked like a castle to me as a kid. A pub – or was it two pubs? And there was a little village shop, all brown paint and dusty cereal boxes in the window.'
'What did people
do there? To get money to buy the cornflakes in the dusty boxes?'
'Agriculture. It was fields all around us, and the local farmer – he was called Freeman – used to give me rides on his tractor. Up and down the field next door and alongside the dike.'
'Dike. Dike,' Maggie muses, as I turn away for a second from the coach that's just cut in and filled my vision with LEEDS TO HEATHROW SIX TIMES DAILY ONLY £14, to see her face take on an ultra proper look. 'I'm assuming that this is "dike",' she continues, 'such as the Dutch boy put his finger into to stop Amsterdam getting flooded.'
'Ah, caught you! Wrong. In Lincolnshire, a dike is not something that's built up like an embankment. It's something you dig out to drain the water away from the fields.'
A Horse in the Bathroom Page 5
