How blessed is he,” wrote Dryden, “who leads a country life/ Unvex’d with anxious cares, and void of strife!” Well, not Joanna Trollope, apparently, who has found her country life in Gloucestershire so far from being unvex’d with anxious cares that she has confided to
Country Life that she is resolved to up and move “to be nearer my family, nearer to London, nearer to Heathrow”.
Now what on earth can have happened in the Cotswolds to have driven the author of (among other bestsellers) A Village Affair and The Rector’s Wife to such extremities (moving closer to Heathrow, I mean. I’m sure her family are perfectly delightful)? The list of vexations as recorded by Country Life is long and various.
There is Kate Moss, for a start. Well, there would be, wouldn’t there? Most disturbances in the current tranquillity of the universe seem to have Moss at the bottom of them, if you look hard enough. I’m sure that scaring thoughtful lady novelists out of the rustic pubs where they had hoped to sip a quiet G&T surrounded by authentic horny-handed sons of toil is only the start of Moss’s plan for reordering first the Cotswolds and then the rest of the world to suit her own sinister purposes.
Where was I? Oh yes. So apart from finding Kate Moss perched on the barstool down the local gastropub — once a humble spit-and-sawdust hovel more picturesquely occupied by shepherds or, as Trollope oddly put it, “tractor drivers”, the other forces of darkness that have driven the novelist to seek sanctuary beneath the flight paths of Heathrow include “raked gravel” and daffodils: “I get nauseated by every village being awash with yellow.”
Ms Trollope is not the first artist with a superfine sensibility to find herself troubled by the change of atmosphere that fashion has wrought in the Cotswolds. Earlier this year Anne Robinson, the presenter of The Weakest Link, who is also selling her home in the Cotswolds, wrote in elegiac mood about the villages “where once there were farmers, farmhands and Army officers (but) now there are more film stars, rock musicians and venture capitalists than there are village fêtes for them to open”. Other residents of Gloucestershire, however, take a more robust view. Jilly Cooper, for one, thinks it’s “great to have have somebody like Liz Hurley to turn on the village lights at Christmas”, adding: “I love Joanna dearly. But she’s very serious.”
“Very serious” is Posh Philistine code for “pretentious, embarrassing and thinks too much”, a point taken up by a convivial gossip columnist , whose column this week contained a story about having a jolly dinner in some Cotswolds hostelry when he was approached by a man who asked him, with agonised courtesy, if he’d mind terribly muting his jollity a bit, as his wife was trying to make an important point about the Modern Novel and was being distracted by the sound of him enjoying himself.
By objecting to the supermodels, the gravel and the daffs, reads the subtext, Trollope has revealed herself as a snobbish killjoy who would like to preserve the countryside as “a kind of healthy grave” (the phrase comes from the urbane clergyman, Sydney Smith — easy to imagine with what joy he would have greeted the Cotswolds gastropubs and their clientele of pretty, independently rich young women and vinous old men).
Less extrovert spirits than those of Jilly Cooper and Sydney Smith may sympathise with Trollope’s distress at the decline of the Gloucestershire countryside from the place once described with relish by Nancy Mitford as “a perfect revelation of beastliness”, to the lively outpost of Notting Hill that it has become. And at the risk of being thought “very serious” by Jilly Cooper, one might acknowledge that the feelings of writers about place are sometimes different from those of supermodels or gossip columnists — but not necessarily less authentic.
At any rate, I think it brave of Joanna Trollope to move from the fake prettiness of the Cotswolds to the real grittiness of London’s outskirts, exchanging the fearful shriek of the mating vixen for — um — the fearful shriek of the mating urban vixen, and the rich crunch of raked gravel for the ominous tinkle of broken windscreens. The only thing is, do you think anyone has told her that we do those terrible eggy-yellow municipal daffs here in London as well?
Of 'sins' and Anglican hymns
I am tempted to linger on the subject of Cotswold Kate, and specifically on the fascinating iconography of a photograph in the December edition Vanity Fair, which shows the model prone on a tumbled bed, while one silver-tabby kitten slumbers sweetly beside her narrow flank and another prowls over the honeyed terrain of her upper thighs. Graham Greene once wrote a biography, Lord Rochester’s Monkey, after a strange and melancholy portrait of the debauched poet-aristocrat, accompanied by a thoughtful simian. Perhaps one day some equally clever writer will be tempted to explore the theme of “Kate and the Kittens”.
Meanwhile, let us turn to another exotic, bewhiskered figure: that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has described as “a sin” the Church of England’s practice of “trying to make cultural captives” by the “mass export of Hymns Ancient and Modern to the remote parts of the mission field”.
Dr Williams is so extremely clever that it is sometimes quite hard for ordinary sinners to work out what he can possibly mean. But if he is implying that the export to Greenland’s icy mountains and India’s Coral strand of Anglican hymns was somehow culturally oppressive, I am afraid he may be guilty of an even worse sin than that of making non-English speakers sing rousing choruses of “We Plough the Fields and Scatter . . .” and that is the sin of being patronising. Who, after all, is to say that those 19th-century converts did not find the tunes of Hymns Ancient and Modern just as exotic and pleasing as we now find the fascinating clicks and atonal harmonies of World Music?
Lies that bind
“Almost 98 per cent of parents tell their children little white lies,” claims a study by the breadmaker Warburtons All in One, prompting one to consider what a horrifying business family life would be if one told no lies at all. (”No, honestly, darling, you were rubbish!”)
