Back in Time

We've just returned from a week in Dorset where, despite my locking the keys in the car when we stopped in Dorchester, we had a wonderful holiday. We're back home now, embroiled in traditional post-holiday activities such as sorting through a snowdrift of junk mail, washing bales of dirty laundry and restoring our stress-levels to pre-holiday conditions so Monday won't come as such a shock.

So much for an idyllic week in the country.

And it was idyllic. The village we stayed in, Marie Osmond, or something like that, was as quaint and peaceful as you could possibly imagine. (It was also a fire insurance salesman's wet dream; I have never seen so many thatched cottages in one place before.) Like many of the settlements in that area, it was almost too small to be considered a village, being, as it was, little more than a collection of ancient stone structures clustered around an equally ancient church.

Strolling along the lane that ran through the village was like stepping back in time; the stillness, the lack of traffic (and, come to think of it, people-we only saw about three other human beings during our seven days there) and the palpable antiquity all combined to give the illusion of having been transported to a medieval village decimated by plague. The abundance of fresh air and evidence of indoor plumbing belied this notion, but it was fun pretending.

At one end of the village we encountered something I had never seen, or even heard of, before: a 'water-splash,' where the road is built under a flowing body of water rather than above it. These are rare even in Britain and require three distinct ingredients: a river, a need to cross the river and a population lacking the funds, space, enthusiasm and/or imagination necessary for building a bridge. In America, we might call this a 'ford,' assuming unsettled land and covered wagons were involved. In Marie Osmond's case, they had two of the three ingredients and a trickle they promoted to A River. (I'm never quite sure what to call water in Britain; the Thames, in places, is about the size of the Kinderhook Creek, and the mighty River Arun, as it flows through Horsham, more resembles an ambitious stream.) Still, it made for an interesting diversion and gave me reason to wonder what happens during the rainy season.

A stone archway occupied a random point along the single street, sheltering a notice-board and serving as a sort of village center. This was, I imagined, where the locals gathered to read about alterations in the bus schedule, hold public hangings and announce the occasional witch burning.

Our cottage was located on the edge of town. It was roomy, attractive and featured a working fireplace with free wood. The yard was equally roomy, bordered by a hedgerow and surrounded by about 5,000 well-behaved sheep, who mostly just stood there providing atmosphere, emitting only the occasional, and non-intrusive, bleat. It was ever so peaceful, and twee enough to make you toss your authentic Dorset Apple Cake.

The nice thing about places like Marie Osmond is that they make grand places to visit; the bad thing is, they make terrible places to live.

In days gone by, the village would have been self-sufficient. The inhabitants would have worked the fields or plied their various trades and found everything they required for their simple but bucolic lives right in their own community. When the agricultural and industrial revolutions hit, however, everyone in towns like these starved to death. It wasn't until the invention of cars and Tesco's that people could return and begin scratching out a living once more.

The people who settled there might have the privilege of residing in impossibly quaint cottages surrounded by stunningly beautiful scenery, but the trade off is, they can't changed the appearances of their houses (which were built in the 1300's and don't come standard with satellite hook ups and broadband) and they have to shop at Tesco's. No cozy neighborhood shops for these people; if they need a pint of milk, it's a six-mile trip to the next town where they have to vie for a slot in the multi-story car park and jostle through the unending, glare-lit isles of a store so soul-suckingly ugly, so unbelievably huge and such an affront to decency as to make the moldering remains of Sam Walton smile.

I don't expect they mind; most of them aren't what you would call country folk, anyway. The only people who can afford to live in places like Marie Osmond are people who get up every morning at 4 AM so they can drive their Jeep Cherokees back to The City they came from and the high-powered job they clawed their way up the corporate ladder to acquire so they could finally have enough money to buy a house in the country and enjoy the stress-free, pastoral lifestyle that so captivated them when they saw it on "Location, Location, Location." No one can actually make a living there except those who provide diversions designed to part tourist from their money. And, of course, fire-insurance salesmen. (Have you ever seen a thatched roof on fire? Bring lots of hot dogs and marshmallows.)

I'd love to continue pontificating on this, but I've got work to do. My wife and I, to stem the boredom of the long car journey, played the popular "What can you spot more of, dead badgers by the side of the road or Little Chef restaurants?" game. I chose Little Chef; my penalty for losing is the laundry.

Say, you don't suppose she'll notice if I don't bother separating the whites and the colors, do you?