Not a Day at the Races

Harking back to a recent post, today's discussion with Pixie over breakfast was about strappy sandals - enough said?

Cheltenham Festival this week, a horse-racing event which causes chaos on the roads and, in a good year, jubilation in the shops and hotels. The area is invaded by the sort of men that you wouldn't want your daughter to marry and the sort of women for whom spending obscene amounts of money gives meaning to their lives. Most locals don't care as long as they get their cut but for those not involved, like me, the whole business is very tiresome (as my Great Aunt Lil would have said). Any journey to the south requires a wide-sweeping detour through the Cotswolds, swinging out in a great arc to the east in order to avoid the sclerotic heart of Gloucestershire.

This detour across the hills took us to Stow-on-the-Wold for coffee and a croissant (awfully posh round there - no buns). It's a bit of an arty place, rather too well littered with Hooray Henrys and dismally infested with Londoners with money to spend. But on a good day, like today, the town manages to rise above these impediments.

Then to Cirencester, across country on the Fosse Way, an ancient Roman road which still manages, in principle, to get from A to B without deviating to C, D, or E. The Romans didn't feel the need to serve every single British settlement they came across; the roads were there to get troops and supplies from one place to the next as quickly as possible. (For an example of the opposite approach, try a number 540 bus between Cheltenham and Evesham).

Cirencester was its usual self, its pretensions countered by the large number of chain store shops. Like many other small towns, the main street could be anywhere -no individuality, nothing to make it any more interesting to shop in than similar neighbours like Evesham, Tewkesbury or Stroud. It is only in small towns, often more like large villages, places like Stow, Pershore, Tetbury, Burford or Lechlade, that you come across shops that possess any sort of originality. And these are constantly under threat from the great malevolent force of British retailing -Tesco's. Hardly a week goes by without some poor benighted community being forced to rise up in order to resist the rapacious demands of this grotesque behemoth. Unfortunately, as is so often the way, a word or two in the right ears and no doubt the odd sweetener smoothes the path through the planning process and, lo and behold, another symbiosis of retailer and consumer bites the dust.

On the way down to the pub last night I had a sudden craving to photograph a telephone box at night. Every ready to oblige, Peter nipped inside this traditional symbol of British communication to do a bit of posing with a handset. That's what mates are for.