Hot damn, rural British bakeries have upped their game, haven’t they? As I drive through pockets of England, it seems to me that every second village (ok, perhaps fourth or fifth, but you get the picture) now has an outstanding bakery, which is honestly quite life changing. It means that even in relatively remote rural life, pistachio and rose cookies and silken oatmeal lattes can be to me what a Penguin biscuit and a cup of milky Nescafe were to my mom in the eighties.
These bakeries, which mostly seem to have sprung up in the last three years while I was living in America, are delicious and seductive, and they aren’t just in the posh or glossy corners, like in the Cotswolds, around Harrowgate or magnetised to Bruton, but sprinkled through villages in much more remote corners of the country. I mentioned this to a friend a couple of weeks ago, and she looked surprised and said she hadn’t noticed. I’ve noticed, because there is nothing like time away to enable a familiar place to you reveal itself to you again. I’m trying to hold on to the feeling of novelty and delight which I first felt when I came home, after three years in America. Do you know the famous quote from TS Eliot about returning to a familiar place? I have thought about it quite a bit recently, and it reads, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Honestly, I am not at all convinced that Thomas Stearns was referring to geographical relocation here, but instead talking about the journey of self-knowledge that happens over a life-time. But that famous quote of his is often slapped on something like a greetings card, to be bought for that god-child heading off to Australia, as if TSE was thinking about how to prep people for their return after a gap year. Forgive me if I am wrong but I don’t think that’s what he intended. What’s often left off that quote is the rest of it, which reads
“We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time./Through the unknown, unremembered gate/When the last of earth left to discover/Is that which was the beginning;/At the source of the longest river/The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple-tree/Not known, because not looked for/But heard, half-heard, in the stillness/Between two waves of the sea.”
I think this is really about self-knowledge, don’t you? Especially since it appears in one of the sections of his great poem, Little Gidding, which really is about both time, and the confluence of past, present and future, as well as the necessity for suffering in life. That aside, the quote is nonetheless useful to remind anyone of the renewal that comes from returning to a familiar place - a theme that feels especially relevant to me at the moment.
So with the greatest of apologies to TS Eliot, here is a list of some of the things that have struck me as funny, ridiculous, irritating, delightful, about everyday life in Britain, in the almost two months I have been back here. My emphasis is rural-heavy, since I live in the countryside, but not exclusively so. And please, lets chat in the comments as I’d absolutely love to hear about the things you have noticed about Britain in the last three years - good, bad and surprising.
Small provincial towns are often brilliant places for clothes shopping, because they combine funny little boutiques selling colourful dresses and fudge-coloured hand knitted scarves, with charity shops for pot-luck pieces, with the odd sporting-goods shop where you can buy a really good mac and a strange canvas bag no-one else will have.
Small local towns, like my beloved Wantage, are unique and brilliant. The despicable British class system is very powerful, and is alive and kicking like never before, holding those down who deserve to flourish, and championing and richly rewarding those who have done nothing to deserve it; the private school system is the fuel that fires this anachronistic lever of power, and yet people swallow the idea that segregating children according to parental income is not only acceptable, but also aspirational. The fact that there are not more people shouting about this feels like a weird kind of brain-washing.
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