Reasons for doing things often become apparent only retrospectively. I should probably have done what the builders advised and tanked out the cellar and made it into a cinema, like all the neighbours have done. But it had all worked out very nicely for everyone concerned. How I would rather watch toads than films, and the children couldn’t have been happier than poking toads. A toad cellar probably doesn’t add the value that a home cinema would, but I was much more at home with it.
BRITAIN’S
BEST VILLAGE
We hadn’t been here very long when John Entwistle died. He was the bass player in The Who and he had lived not far away in Stow-on-the-Wold. I was as surprised to discover he’d lived nearby, as to learn that he was dead. He died in a hotel room in Las Vegas. I thought about him. You could just hear church bells pealing in the haze of the distance if you listened as carefully as you could. It was so quiet and it was just nice, and I wondered how bored I’d be in Las Vegas and what would have happened to me if this hadn’t.
I don’t think I could ever get bored of this place. It was a bright, infinite, bread and butter midwinter day. Sheep were giving an impression of idleness. Sheep are calming, particularly when seen in the middle distance, nibbling away at the grass. Pigs are at their best close up. They gush with industry and delight. They were always up to something or talking about something to each other. The Empresses had completely won me over and I was putting up more fences, and some pig houses – ‘pigloos’ – in the woods so that we could get some more. The more pigs there are in the world, the better.
The upshot of the starry-eyed plunge we took when we bought the place on our honeymoon was that I was continually faced with a million practicalities. I don’t think we would ordinarily have been bold enough to take such a big step had we not been fresh in love and captivated by each other and the thought of going somewhere new and doing something new. This was where I worked, but first of all it was my home. It was my life.
I worked hard. I got up early. I stayed up late. I rode my bicycle to the village. I still didn’t know what the hell I was doing or what was happening half the time, and I missed Blur. Blur were brilliant and I missed being a part of something that good. I thumped through lots of books and I planned agricultural experiments for the coming spring. I discovered tomato plants can grow twenty-eight feet high. I planned orchards. It was possible, with the right combination of trees to have apples in fruit nearly all year. I was getting to grips with roofs and drains, but I still knew nothing about crops, tenancy agreements, single farm payments or swill licences. Actually, I’ve only just found out I needed a swill licence. I was learning a lot every day and that was what I liked about it.
The nights were cold and dark. I was still a long way from turning the farm into a reasonable business. I was in my shed getting to grips with the elements of English gardens. I’d been reading about forestry all day and I was having a break. It was a really interesting section on pergolas – which I had instantly become a huge fan of. It was just like the first time I heard The Smiths. I was dreaming of making a really long and elaborate bower when the not so pretty gypsy girl came to the door, ashen-faced and said, ‘You need to come now. There’s loads of ca–cameras, see.’ She looked terrified. I could indeed see through the window that there were half a dozen news crews at the front door: cameras, producers with clipboards, runners, make-ups and a gaggle of pretty-but-too-skinny presenters with microphones. I hadn’t done a press conference since I got married. I wasn’t used to the limelight any more. I wondered what on earth could have happened. Whenever there are that many cameras at the door you assume something really terrible has been discovered. I could feel my pulse in my temples. The fight or flight reflex kicked in. I marched out of the door straight towards them, but as soon as they saw me, all their faces lit up. Every single one of them was smiling. The gods were smiling on us. They all talked at once and wanted to know what I thought about Kingham, the local village, being voted ‘Britain’s Finest Village’ by Country Life magazine. I said ahem, obviously we liked it here but I didn’t imagine that it is, or even if there is such a thing. I did laugh out loud though and I felt vindicated, just a little bit. I’d never heard of the place when we arrived, didn’t even know it was there. I thought this was the middle of nowhere. It had quite quickly become the centre of my world but I didn’t expect the rest of the world to notice it. Suddenly it was on the map and it felt like somehow or other we had landed on our feet.
There was a longstanding rivalry between the two neighbouring villages, Churchill and Kingham. For a lifetime, Churchill up the road had had the upper hand: the taller church spire (modelled on the one at Magdalen College), the best swing park (dedicated under-sevens area), and the best pub (The Chequers). But the balance of snobbery suddenly shifted, and they’ve been ringing the bells at St Andrew’s in Kingham a little bit louder ever since. Of course it was all utter nonsense, but the judges were keen on the fact that Kingham had plenty of low-cost housing, as well as mansions and manors. That had struck me too. There was an amazing cross section of people in the village, from rehoused travellers to High Court judges. There is a cricket green at one end and a well-used football pitch at the other. There is a thriving village shop, a school and a troublesome teenager or two, and it was flanked and bordered by land that had been, some of it for many generations, in the hands of grand families: some mad, some bad, some lovely. It was just a little bit real, Kingham. There are villages in the Cotswolds that are among the prettiest places on earth, places that take your breath away. Hidden corners, which can feel more like exclusive islands in the South Pacific, disconnected from the rest of the world.
Kingham is an entry-level kind of paradise with geezers, asbos and greboes. I don’t think anyone in Kingham took the matter very seriously, although everyone in the Tollgate Inn stayed late that night, but all the surrounding villages, the ones with better preserved stocks, earlier architecture and more legitimately famous residents were clearly slightly miffed as time went on, and as the place was continually mentioned as the jewel of the Cotswolds. The Cotswolds is snobbier than Paris, snootier than Upper West Side Manhattan, and the residents of Lower Slaughter, which always performs very well in ‘Britain in Bloom’, or Upper Slaughter, which has a Michelin-starred restaurant, were somewhat taken aback. Kingham could only boast a family-owned hotel that served twelve-course spectaculars in a creaky old silence. I rather like that hotel. There is the British Legion, too, for the geezers. Geezers have very few places left to go now that their natural habitats, pubs, are full of middle-class women drinking rosé.
Even though it is ridiculous to say somewhere is better than anywhere else, there was a serious upshot for the local community. The buoyancy of Kingham’s assets made it easier for local businesses to get investment. There was an accompanying redevelopment boom of such proportions that it was impossible to get a local builder. They all remortgaged and went to work on each other’s houses. The camping site had already transformed into a camping suite. Our nearest neighbour, a plumber, knocked his cottage down and replaced it with a post-modern eco-castle. The electrician bought a tranche of East Anglia and disappeared.
I took up football again, but here it was played slightly differently. My first Kingham football match was the best I’ve ever played in. It may not have featured the most skilled exponents of the game, but it was the most fun. It was an old Etonian, an autistic ten-year-old, a passing crusty dogwalker and a nightclub promoter, against the mums, the toddler and me. I was wearing a suit and a pair of GI pumps. The girls were in tight jeans. There was a lot of mud on the pitch, from a tractor driving back and forth, by the look of things, and the chaps had the considerable advantage of the slope. Blackie, who had been walking his dog, was in goal. He said he’d once been the drummer in Hawkwind. He looked like he might have been. He didn’t have many teeth left. When he found out