We’ve just returned from a fab little stay in a Cotswold. Not sure which one, they all look so similar. It wasn’t Clarkson’s one, that’s for sure. Though there were plenty of cars there, but during Easter hols, that’s to be expected.

We went on Thursday because I needed to drive very fast and there is, quite literally, nowhere in the whole of Greater London where such a thing can be done, even just marginally illegally. Only very VERY illegally. So we needed open roads, some Motorways, and lots of fab, windy little race-tracks. Ok, not race tracks by any normal definition but country lanes where, if you’re driving above 90, the odd little ‘20mph bits of some tiny village or other’ you pass within 3 seconds. How much damage could you in that time?

We stopped in the fabulous town of Burford. Oh, you MUST know Burford? Surely? It’s a Cotswold, but a bit different. Achingly sweet, twee, almost smug high street, filled with loads of independent stores, cutely named, run by locals, selling bottles of 2-quid liquid soap for £2, plus £22.99 for the ‘Cotswolds’ label. Which is actually made in China. The high road is 100 yards long and then goes off into a beautiful vista of rolling hills covered in green stuff. With trees on. It really is sweet. And the local people are all Japanese. Amazing. Such diversity in such a ‘WASPy’ area of the country, but that’s what we found. Japanese in their national costume of jeans, Uniqlo, Nikon camera, selfie stick with go-pro.

Then, in the evening, we went to a wedding. NOT a ‘destination wedding’ because you have to get on a plane for one of those. More and ‘in-our-nation’ wedding. In another Cotswold just 10 minutes from our one. There’s hundreds of them out there where Oxfordshire meets Gloucestershire. Whereas in London, there’s hardly any.

I suppose, for Mel, we went to a wedding and drove there. For me, we went for a drive and took in a wedding. To kill a few hours. Let the car cool down.

It was fantastic. In a place call ‘the Stone Barn’. I never said they were imaginative, but what a place. Just wonderful. There was a bride there. Who looked almost as fabulous as I did. AND even a groom. And we through confetti over them. But being the Cotswolds, this was not yesterday’s Daily Mail run through a shredder (as all copies should be, preferably before reading) but real, genuine rose petals. Because it’s in the countryside, innit? The whole event was simply brilliant. Wonderful atmosphere in our ‘barn’. Sort of ‘barn’ the King would would have, if he hosted corporate events, weddings and barmitzvahs. And we ate, we certainly drank and then we danced the night away under the Cotswoldian stars. Which are different from the ones in London. Mainly because they’re not shrouded in smog.

Anyway, that was done. Today we got back in the car and drove like mad things!!! Ok, mad thing.

Happy Friday

A xxxx