Biscuits, Beer and Beaches

Sometimes, you can go away to a foreign country and it can feel instantly like home. I felt like that in Vienna and my son, who is in Japan tells me he feels safer in Tokyo at night than in our own quiet Essex High Street.  Other times, you can go away in England and feel as though you have stepped onto another planet.

We are staying on the Dorset/Devon border and it could be a foreign land, or more accurately another time.  I remember this feeling when, as a child, in the Seventies, we went to Cornwall.  The shops closed half-way through the day, the pubs didn't serve food, cream teas were unique to the area (what magic was this clotted cream?)  and there was hardly a car to be seen.  We have rented somewhere to stay that is on a private estate.  It was the old dog kennels. The estate was built between 1874 and 1878 for James Peek (of the Peek Frean Biscuit factory fame). He built himself a whole village, including a church and school. The estate was taken over by a school and is now in the hands of a group of shareholders, who all own property on the land and work to manage the estate in a sensitive and ecological way.  All the water is managed by a reed-bed system and the grounds are picture perfect.  The estate also has it's own private beach (an SSSI) and manages it's own woodland.  There are buzzards in the sky and sheep in the fields. It's like stepping into a novel set in the 1950's countryside.

The area is a little unusual.  It's the kind of place where an Englishman's home can really be his castle. It's a place where a river flows down the street, deck chairs are perfectly lined up along the beach, beer is offered at the local church and map's don't need labels.

 

The estate is a place that gets stories swirling through my head. Every person you meet is of a certain type: white, middle class, with a sense of entitlement. All the adults have been to University and all the children are expected to go to. Only Waitrose vans are allowed to deliver to the estate.  Clothes are by Joules or Boden and shoes are Hafflingers. They picnic on the beach every Sunday and even though the beach is huge there are still spots that people consider to be their own.
"Mr S! How are you?  You better not be in my spot!"
"I'm over there, Flissy.  You snooze, you lose."
Flissy stomps off in a bit of a huff.  Her husband takes Mr S by the hand, grabbing his elbow with the other. They talk quietly for a while.
"Just call me, Mr United bloody Nations," he says loudly.
Ideas flit through my head about the deal they have just made.

I imagined a post Brexit world, where people could close the gates and pretend that they had actually managed to turn the clock back.
"It's been done," said the Long Suffering Husband. "Haven't you seen The Village?"
I haven't but he has told me that it doesn't end well.