Weekend Outfit

I woke up feeling ridiculously happy today. Which is strange because it is dark and chilly and pouring with rain and I am (probably) coming down with a cold. My boyfriend is recovering from man-flu, so it figures. I am also exhausted – it has been a particularly gruelling week at work. But it is Friday, and this weekend is a bank holiday and we are going on a road trip. I am mid ‘I Capture the Castle’ by Dodie Smith, which is a wonderfully feel-good book, and my friend Kate has leant me two more – ‘The Waves’ by Virginia Woolf and a series of essays entitled ‘The Great Cat Massacre’ by Robert Darnton. I find a great reading list on the bedside table does wonders for my mood.

We have a plan. And I do love an itinerary, even if spontaneity always scuppers it in the end. This weekend we will be following the sun – to Somerset tonight, staying in Bath; tomorrow will be spent idling around the city – coffee at the Fine Cheese Company, vintage shopping at the Saturday market and Vintage to Vogue boutique, getting haircuts, driving out to Wellow for an afternoon walk and catching up with friends in our favourite pub, the Bell. On Sunday we will press on towards Wales through Monmouthshire to Abergavenny and up the Vale of Grywney to Hay on Wye, where we are staying at a B&B on the river. Monday will be mooching around the second-hand bookshops in Hay, having a long boozy lunch, followed, later, by an energetic late-afternoon climb to the summit of the Sugar Loaf.

What can I say? Sometimes all you need is an itinerary and a cute outfit.Saturday morning outfit for vintage shopping: Grey marl knitted tunic dress, vintage, taupe snakeskin Genevra belt by LK Bennett, grey fedora by Christy’s London, taupe suede Icone boots by Ash,  Le Pliage bag in taupe, by Longchamp.

Liscious

My favourite shop in Jericho, the antique furniture store Liscious, is closing. They are opening, in its place, a Tesco Metro. It’s a sad loss for our little neighbourhood – I have bought some amazing vintage dresses from Liscious. Luckily, their main showroom is now in Summertown, so not too far away, but we will miss them for Saturday morning browsing after brunch at the Bleroni Cafe.

The Island

Friday 5 August 2011Portsmouth Docks

The Solent

Ryde, Isle of Wight

Ryde Pier

Seaview

The Northbank, Seaview

Saturday 6 August 2011

Seaview

Bembridge

Seagrove Bay

The Seaview Yacht Club

The Seaview ‘Mermaids’

Sunday 7 August 2011Seaview Esplanade

The Priory Bay Hotel

Priory Bay

Portsmouth Guildhall

Pages from my Journal

We drive south on the M3 towards the coast, leaving the car in Portsmouth and cycling onto the passenger ferry. The catamaran crosses the strait from the mainland to the diamond-shaped Isle of Wight, fraught with bankers in dark grey suits and polished leather shoes. We dock at Ryde Pierhead. Cycling along the pier at twilight, smoking a slightly damp roll-up makes me feel deliriously happy, for some reason. It is the loveliest of English summer evenings – the air is fresh and clear, the light misty mellow, glancing off the windows of the grand Edwardian facades along the esplanade and the dark water rushing unhindered through the pillars of the timber-planked promenade and tramway pier. I love the pleasant nostalgia of Ryde, the yesteryear clues from when this must have been a fashionable seaside resort attracting wealthy Londoners who patronised the public baths, danced in the ballrooms, chattered in the pavilions and strolled along the pleasure piers.

We follow the esplanade below the tree-lined parks at Puckpool, reaching the duver at Seaview as dark falls. We choose the Northbank for drinks; it being a Friday, and the first of the Cowes week regatta, the windows of the Old Fort on the seawall are steamy and as the door swings open we hear the clamour of boisterous yachtsmen and see that the bar is packed. It is inevitable that many of our good friends from London will be in the warm cavern of the pub, but we’re feeling couple-y and anti-social. And there is nowhere better than the bar at the Northbank when you are feeling anti-social.

The Northbank, where I have spent some of the strangest evenings of my life, captive in warped time, vinyl still playing scratchily on the old gramophone… The ‘residents only’ sign on the ivy-covered wooden gate puts most people off, although most of the time there are no residents, only an elderly mother and her two middle-aged sons, one badly scarred from an accident with fire when he was a boy, who collects vintage Jaguars and motorbikes and drinks whisky from a tea-cup. We wander down the hall, our footsteps creaking on the floorboards. There is no-one around. My partner tells me about the wakes following the funerals of his maternal grandparents, which were both held here. He tells me out of politeness, really – it is suddenly very quiet but for the garden door clattering against its frame, and I have heard the stories before. Eventually we ring the bell for service in the back bar and after a few minutes a monosyllabic, darting-eyed teenager arrives to charge us for the beers we have pulled ourselves. Then the three of us sit, looking out at the dark figures of elm trees against the water and beyond to the shipping lanes, he perched on a bar stool, fiddling with a white tea-cloth, us sipping our flat beers and leaning into one another on the faded red sofa. At length the teenager makes eye contact and clears his throat. ‘You from round ‘ere, then?’ he asks, without interest, and knowing full well we are not, though my partner Will’s grandparents grew up on the Island and he has grown up spending three months of every summer here, himself. Later, we are joined by a newly married couple and their parents. They are red faced from too much wine at supper, the father collapsing beside me exclaiming Splendid! Company in the bar! before falling asleep and having his stray, rather overgrown eyebrows pulled out by his son. The daughter and her mother-in-law, in high spirits, order Bloody Marys from the poor barman, who has obviously never heard of such a thing. We leave by the back gate, glad to be out in the cool evening air, still hearing their shrieks of Horseradish! Tabasco!   More! More!

Seaview is a picturesque, quintessentially British seaside village, a small sailing resort, with an elegant Victorian maritime atmosphere, the pebbled Seagrove Bay neighboured by the unspoilt distinctly ‘Robinson Crusoe’ sands of Priory Bay, St Helen’s duver and Bembridge Harbour, and has a church, a post office, a stationary shop, a grocers, one pub and, oddly, a Thai restaurant. The streets of the village climb the hill away from the mouth of the harbour with its painted beach huts, lined with Victorian and Edwardian holiday homes with views of the hand built Seaview dinghies bobbing at their moorings and the lights of seaside cities on the mainland. Behind are wooded lanes, tithe barns, the village green at St Helen’s and rolling fields of ploughed earth dotted by livestock.

We arrive, breathless, and cycle into the undercroft, leaving our bicycles unlocked against the wooden dinghy and retrieve the key from the squirrel house. There are no lights on – Will’s parents are out to a dinner party. In the hall, the scent of roses and sun cream. We take hot showers, cook ham and eggs wearing chintzy aprons, suddenly realizing we are ravenous, and eat hungrily, spooning crab meat from a tub bought from Tina the ‘crab-lady’ onto torn pieces of bread and washing it down with sweet glasses of Moscadet, reflecting how a few hours of sea air makes everything taste so much more delicious – the ham saltier, the eggs creamier, the crab richer.

It is not midnight when we climb the winding, squeaky stairs to our bedroom. We try to wait up, but the next morning are told that we were found together, Tatler and old copies of County and Town House still open, wrapped in the striped duvet strewn with Tunnock’s caramel bar wrappers; flushed and fast asleep, heedless to his parents drunkenly stumbling up the lawn, giggling, unable to slot the key into the lock.

Beckley

We are trying to buy a house. I say ‘trying’, because it is proving rather more laborious than we expected to find a house. But perhaps the journey is all a part of the quest. So yes, I have been thinking about houses a lot recently. I wouldn’t even say we’re finding it hard because we are especially picky – I have been told that it is not unusual to look at up to thirty properties before buying, and that you should be open-minded, casting out any images of your perfect home to make a successful choice. And after-all we’ve viewed period terraced houses in North and East Oxford, a flat in a brutal/beautiful Nordic-looking block on the Woodstock Road (which I loved because it reminded me of Wallander), contemporary apartments in Jericho, a derelict pub, and most recently a four-storey building on Walton Street housing a characterful three-bed maisonette and on the ground floor, a charity shop (now, mores’ the pity under offer to someone else). There has been excitement and disappointment and I’ve learned about leases and mortgages and that there is such a thing as ‘concrete cancer’ (the reason we decided against the Nordic block).

The difficulty is that we are not only looking to buy a home. Where we do buy is unlikely to be the house where we begin a family, but you never know – catchment areas for good nursery schools are certainly a factor. Like everybody else, probably, we are also carefully looking for a sober investment, something with potential to renovate or extend, sell for a profit next year or the year after and move somewhere bigger and better. My partner, being an architect, is more ambitious than I, because he can envisage the potentially transforming result of taking out walls to produce larger, more open-plan spaces, opening up the roof into a mezzanine studio, for example, or extending on and constructing an oblong glass structure to house a kitchen. And I, being the daughter of a interior designer and a father who has worked in property in London all his life, and who as a child wandered happily around the dusted-sheeted building sites of gutted houses in Putney and Chelsea and Richmond, am more than used to the lengthy processes of a conversion.

The one thing we dislike about Oxford is its flatness; the land here is flush and unbroken. There are no natural summits – the landscape is supine, the only cliffs and peaks created by high-rise faculty buildings. And we both love hills, the feeling of departure and separation they give you. Climbing a hill away from the town is akin to an intermission – the air clarifies, the head clears and you gain a new perspective from a hill-top. And so, we widened our boundaries, which brought us to Beckley, 4.5 miles from our home in Jericho. As we got into the car, we decided to measure the time it took to drive, which turned out to be a concise eleven minutes each way door to door – an abbreviation, even, to my partners current commute to his practice by bicycle (13 minutes).

Winding away from Oxford to the north-east, gently uphill all the way, the road to Beckley is immediately rural just minutes from Summertown and the Northern Bypass.  A tapering lane, narrowed by cow parsley, it runs first through the village of Elsfield. A peacock, red chickens and white geese peck around on the warm tarmac; the cottages are ochre-coloured stone and thatched; the view across the Otmoor wetlands an enduring agricultural expanse of field and hedgerow. You could be in Cornwall. There is an absence of white noise, just birdsong, dogs barking – pastoral sounds – and, minutes away from the city, the rhythm is markedly milder and slower. It is an utterly tranquil spot. There is a Norman parish church with a 14^th century wall mural of the weighing of souls, a lovely, wood-floored pub with an open log fire, the Abingdon Arms, which was remembered fondly by Winston Churchill in his diaries with the recollection of ‘drinking rum and water from large pewter tankards and eating bread and cheese’.  And last but not least there is a supposedly excellent school…

The house we have found for sale is an old, converted chapel. It is pretty, but a little forsaken. Promising, we think. And there is a small plot of land at the rear onto which one could extend the property by 1/3 of its current size should planning be granted. In essence, the potential is palpable, and there are distinct benefits – the solid wood floors, sturdy farmhouse-style kitchen units, the open fireplace, the garden. So we sit outside the Abingdon Arms with a glass of ale and my partner draws sketches of extensions and we discuss the possible advantage of timber clapboard and I ponder the benefits of growing wisteria up the facade and which particular shade of taupe would soften the weatherboarding and window frames, now a rather stark white and a little austere against the soft carnelian-coloured brick.

I must say, it never seriously occurred to me to move out of the city, though I was determined to maintain an ‘open mind’. Even leaving Oxford this evening, I felt faintly anxious at the idea of ‘moving to the country’, of not being within walking distance of a coffee-shop, having to drive rather than cycle to do my grocery shopping (my heavy Dutch-style sit-up-and-beg bicycle would baulk at the hill), or nip down to the newsagents to buy cigarettes and a newspaper. On the other hand, maybe I’d be happier, perhaps getting out of the city every night would mean I could leave work at work.

The house is at the end of the village, at the bottom of a steep lane that takes you over a bridle-pass with views over the broad, green valley below. For people who love watching the seasons change and walking it seems remarkable to even find somewhere so close to Oxford, yet completely rural. I think I would write well here. Evelyn Waugh certainly did. Whilst sharing a caravan in 1925 with a friend in the yard of the village pub, he penned Vile Bodies, later writing: ‘In the evenings I sit with the farmers in the kitchen drinking beer. I like so much the way they don’t mind not talking.’

We could keep chickens, I say. I could buy a motorbike and ride down into Oxford, weaving through the rush hour traffic on the Woodstock Road to work. My partner is looking at me tolerantly. And then he reflects that even if our offer isn’t accepted or if we find something else, or if the survey shows up a damp problem caused by the stream that runs parallel to the house, we are inevitably edging closer to the right one, and a new chapter, and along our journey we are discovering new places, rather than just insisting on the same old streets that we have walked a thousand times. Yes I agree, and what a heavenly evening we’ve had, on a hot summer day in Oxfordshire, and all the possibilities ahead, the pure pleasure of the hunt.