cotwolds easter

We covered a fair bit of track over the last 4 days.

London---> Bath---> Chipping Sodbury----> Tortworth----> Bristol---->Wotton-Under-Edge----> Cheltenham----> Lower Slaughter----> Oxford----> London.

One forgets that when one does a road trip in the UK, you don't drive for more than two hours without reaching the edge of country. It's not like days on end in the Karroo, where Cape Town is barely reachable within two days solid driving.

We bought another couple with us, and together ate fuck loads of chocolate while meandering through the literary elite hot spots of Bath and Oxford, while staying in our suitably imposing and stately manor house in the heart of the Cotswolds.

It was very agreeable.

We even got a three course meal included in the deal for dinner. Food baby much?

I have seen Bath and Oxford, but the rest on our voyage of discovery had been left to our imaginations on what we think they might look like.

The Cotswolds is almost unforgivably beautiful. Just painstakingly old, and all the buildings are crafted from Cotswold limestone. It's a sort of yellowed, golden stone, quarried in Gloucestershire. I had no idea about this.

The age of some of these places (pubs established in the 1100's, for example), all crafted from this stone (roof tiles included) makes it rather remarkable in terms of classic English countryside.

If you're a scone purist (like me; I grew up in the Natal Midlands), then you would've done what we did - went on the hunt for the perfect Cream Tea.

I'm more than a scone purist. I'm a scone ho. Give me a scone and I'll probably make love to it. In public. Lewdly.

Where was I? A 'cream tea' isn't a tea with a blob of cream inside. It's a tea with a scone, that comes with fresh clotted cream on the side. It's fucking to die for.

We went on a walk around the Tortworth Court property, consisting of forest - which they like to verbosify as 'arboretum.'

Apparently that's the linguistic equivalent to 'forest' as 'extrapolate' is to 'guess.'

On trunching through the forest, fast realised it's the pivotal scene of slasher film cliche's - where murder novels or horror movies are drawn. Where some dude without a face starts wielding a scythe towards blissfully unaware tourists like us, and the sole survivor scrambles through fences and such. We were on edge.

I mean, there was a prison nearby.

When suddenly - and I nearly did something most unladylike in my undergarments - when we came across murder most foul a dead mannequin in the forest.

I then bent over to touch the [fake] body and thrust my hand unwittingly into a bunch of stinging nettles.

I thought the African jungle was fraught with shit. Nay nay. Don't mock stinging nettles. Ouchy ouchy!


It was such a lovely weekend though. Some serious lollage. To get out into the country, and leave the nutters and crowds back in London to their own defenses.

And I bought a new tweed jacket in Bristol. It's ah-mazing.