Cream Teas, Mysterious Stones and Land Rovers

During the last week of mine and Benji's trip home last August, we went down to Bath to stay with Shimane’s ex-best ALT in the Tsuwano region – Mr. Sam Barclay. He had only been back in Bath 2 weeks. He took it upon himself to be our tour guide around the city although we suspect he made most of it up...

We saw the Pump House, the Royal Crescent and had a Cream Tea at Sally Lunn’s – the oldest tea rooms in Bath. By the way, when you have a Cream Tea, it is advisable NOT to eat a whole tub of clotted cream, unless you enjoy feeling sick for the whole day. (I wasn’t being greedy, I just didn’t want to be rude….and it cost a bloody arm and a leg).

We were originally supposed to go and see Stonehenge because it is a World Heritage site and I wanted to use Ben an excuse to visit it and do things I would never normally do. However, Sam wanted to take us to another place called Avebury which is the same kind of thing – a number of large, strange stones in a random field, the purpose of which no one alive today understands. Avebury was cool and much less crowded than I expect Stonehenge is. The good thing about Avebury is that it is free, the stones are not roped off and there are cows and sheep wandering around looking at you in a bemused manner.

We stayed the night at Sam’s parent’s house.
Sam lives in a twee little village that really puts the ‘Priss’ in ‘Priston’. It is just like one of those chocolate-box English villages where every other person is called ‘Henry’ or ‘Edward’ and their wives are in the Women’s Institute and their children go to Boarding school and they all vote Tory.

I bet they don’t get many chavs in baseball caps joyriding through their streets at 4am high on Vodka and Tamazepam….lucky buggers. As I suspected I saw some Land rovers and muddy wellies in the vicinity, always a true sign of a well-heeled village. I found it charming.

It reminded me of the summer in 2000 I worked for ‘Bell Language International’, at Bloxham Boarding school in Oxfordshire. That year, I really got a glimpse of what it would be like to go to a £20,000 a year school. It was a bit like a Harry Potter school, and they had huge grand paintings of posh old pompous white blokes on the dining room hall walls. The village had just two pubs and a quaint little post office. I stayed in a stone cottage with twenty two bedrooms and the prettiest English garden you’ve ever seen.

This was where the sixth formers (year twelve) students stay. In their school they had archery and lacrosse teams, went skiing every year and had a big pool and sauna right in the middle of the school ground. This was certainly different to working for the ‘Welsh Language Initiative’ Play schemes in South Wales, where a child’s placement for a day used to cost about £3.75 you have to wait your turn to use the scissors and the only trip they get is at the free museum in Cardiff!

At Bloxham, however, I worked alongside people who had attended Eton and St. Andrews. I felt really conspicuous and at first, about as welcome as a fart in a space suit, but it was all my paranoia that perhaps I wasn’t ‘good enough’ or ‘posh enough’. I actually used to enjoy the banter between me and the Eton boy, he used to taunt me about going fox hunting on Boxing Day so I used to cut out adverts from the RSPCA and PETA and stick them on the wall, when I knew it was his shift.

This one time, his motorbike that cost more than a year’s fees at the same school was stolen from the village. He was devastated, but there was a little part of me that thought ‘ha-ha’ like the fat kid from ‘The Simpsons’. I don’t know whether that was just down to my Intolerable cynicism and cruelty or a more likely, a working-class chip on my shoulder.

Anyway later that day, one of our staff members happened to find his bike in a nearby country lane. He was so relieved to have his little bike back that he took us all out for a quick Magnum of champers at the local.

That day, I had torn the ligaments in my thumbs doing a spastic pike jump on the trampoline. It really bloody hurts, having torn thumb ligaments, so I put my hands in the champagne bucket to soothe them and Eton boy said ‘That’s what we love about you, dear girl…you’re so incredibly classy. But we wouldn’t have it any other way…’ He really was lovely (swoon) and despite being a toff, I found it impossible not to get along with him. Anyway…yeah so Priston reminded me of Bloxham.

Sam’s parents were lovely and they had lush dogs, one of which was named George, a Springer spaniel. There’s nothing that gives me more joy than an affectionate and stupid dog. George was both these things. Sam’s dad took me around their veggie garden and seemed surprised that I recognised rhubarb and runner beans. When I was younger and before both parents used to work quite so much, we had quite an impressive range of veggies.

I thought to myself ‘Ahhhhhh this is the life…’ I think Bath and Somerset and Gloucester areas have some really pretty villages and towns. I really wouldn’t mind settling there (even thought it’s England…I think I could get over it…) and it’s close enough to South Wales that anytime I wanted to go see the clan, or possibly go joyriding through the streets in a stolen car at 4am, high on Vodka and Tamazepam, then my little home town hamlet of Tonyrefail is no less than 1.5 hours away….