I grew up in a modest family where tea wasn’t just a drink; it was a mealtime. Then at the age of fourteen, I was offered a place at a local grammar school, and in the time it took for my lovably distinct Bristolian accent to be replaced by a bland BBC English, I had betrayed my roots, and allowed ‘tea’ to become ‘dinner’.
Then I turned twenty-one, got a corporate job in London and started to discover the world of the wealthy. I bought myself a posh suit from Hobbs, a pair of pearl earrings and started ordering my steak medium rare in an attempt to fit in. But through it all I have remained an outsider, a voyeur of the posh, who would much rather tuck into BBQ ribs at a Harvester than quaff three courses of foam at a Michelin-starred restaurant. So the ladder won’t take me any higher, and the defining characteristic of a posh person will always be just out of my reach: ‘dinner’, I have to accept, will never become ‘supper’.
I am convinced that this small nuance of my vocabulary is entirely to blame as I set myself on the first challenge for my FOMO and toil for weeks to infiltrate the aristocracy. Was I really missing out on something wonderful by not being a part of this old-money world? Was this a lifestyle I should aspire to, like a modern-day Cinderella? I vowed to find out.
And so it was that – after hundreds of unanswered emails, seventeen unacknowledged letters, God knows how many unreturned voicemails to the estates of various lords and ladies, multiple ‘Does anyone know someone remotely connected to the aristocracy?’ Facebook pleas, and even a returned letter from the Queen (who politely declined my request to spend a week in Buckingham Palace) – I was finally connected to my boss’s wife’s friend’s aunt, who just so happens to be Auriol, Marchioness of Linlithgow.
Auriol’s forefathers were highly respected Welsh landowners and knights, descended from Urien Rheged – a sixth-century king – and Thomas Wayte, a regicide who signed the death warrant for Charles I, an original copy of which hangs in her downstairs loo.
Shortly after a charming introductory phone call, I am kindly invited to spend a week with Auriol at her country estate in Wales. Her great-great-grandfather, Martin Williams, graduate of Eton and Oxford, bought Bryngwyn Hall in 1813. The 450-acre property includes extensive forestry, a farm, a series of outbuildings, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a croquet lawn and a lake.
Navigating the long, winding drive, I swerve manically to avoid kamikaze pheasants as the beauty of Bryngwyn Hall comes closer into view. Once at the top, I park next to a tractor with a huge rug draped over its elevated forks.
‘Is Auriol around?’ I ask a pretty and athletic-looking lady in soil-covered jeans as she vigorously beats the rug with what looks like a broom handle.
She stops and turns around. ‘Ah, Lady L,’ she says, smiling. ‘Yes, I think she is in her office.’
I am sent into the enormous front hall, edged with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that burst with ancient gold-leafed books and taxidermy birds. A giant fireplace holds centre stage in the room, above which hangs an eight-foot painting of Auriol’s great-uncle, whom she later explains was killed by injuries sustained while lion hunting in Somaliland. Suddenly my mid-range bottle of Rioja and withering Co-op flowers seem rather underwhelming; embarrassing, even.
I am greeted by a kindly lady with a matriarchal air, cropped hair and a blue-and-white-striped apron around her middle. A pair of glasses hang from a chain around her neck.
‘Hello, I’m Christine.’ She wipes her hand on her apron and shakes my hand vigorously. ‘Christine the cook.’ Beginning her tenure as the nanny of Auriol’s son, Christine explains that she has been a loyal employee of the family for thirty-two years.
A moment later Auriol breezes into the vast kitchen and accepts my bunch of flowers with an earnest smile. She squints over a pair of square glasses, her shoulder-length blonde hair framing a make-up-free face.
‘The wine is to apologise for the flowers.’ I offer a hopeful smile.
‘Oh, they’re beautiful,’ she beams, before asking Lisa from the housekeeping team to show me to my room. ‘Bedroom five and bathroom two.’
I walk up the elegant wraparound staircase that dominates the enormous hallway, passing horse statues and bronze busts on my way. My bedroom is large and full of what I can only assume is antique wooden furniture, with two beds, high ceilings and an open fireplace. I unpack my carefully researched wardrobe for the week (modelled mostly on my poshest friends from Exeter University), change into a cream shirt under a simple grey sweater, and head back down to the kitchen.
‘You hev a b-yew-tiful home,’ I say, sounding like a child doing an impression of the Queen, as we sit down to lunch. I decide to abandon my posh voice.
‘I love it here. To me it’s heaven.’ Auriol smiles wistfully before giving a swift nod and switching to the unique no-nonsense timbre of rural Britain. ‘But the house has to earn its keep,’ she says. ‘We all work terribly hard hosting weddings, garden tours and shooting parties. You always have to be thinking outside the box for ways the house and gardens can pay for themselves.’
The estate currently employs mainly part-time and seasonal staff, including a cook/housekeeper, cleaners, a head gardener, two groundsmen, a bookkeeper and a series of contractors.
‘I have had all sorts of people work for me,’ Auriol tells me. ‘One couple arrived while I was having a dinner party. Christine walked into the dining room and said, “His hair’s longer than yours, and they’re vegetarian.” They lasted two weeks.’
After lunch, Auriol takes me out for a tour of her land in a four-wheel drive. We head over to a large piece of forestry on the opposite side of the valley, grown for conservation purposes – ‘because I love trees’ – and eventually as a way of making money when the wood is ready for sale.
‘How often are you able to get a crop?’ I ask.
‘Oh, they won’t be ready for felling any time soon,’ she says. ‘My son will be lucky to get even a thin crop from them during his lifetime. It’s more for the generations to come.’
I struggle to comprehend this sense of responsibility for future generations; of gratification delayed to the extent of not being around to see it. It’s such an alien concept to me. I am too wrapped up in my own mortality, my own ego, to even consider creating a legacy for my children’s children. I mean, I can’t even bring myself to start a pension. But lineage and ancestry are still deeply important to people like Auriol. I suppose this must be the result of knowing so much about your ancestors, of seeing their pictures hanging in your house as a child and being able to trace back your bloodline all the way to the Tudors. I just can’t imagine what that would be like.
We walk Auriol’s black Labrador a little further along the side of a hill towards the woodland, the meandering path edged with occasional small black shards and discs that look like furniture castor cups. Auriol tuts when she sees them, explaining that they are the remnants of the last day’s shooting on her land.
‘Do you see inheriting this place as a burden or a blessing?’ I ask, as she bends to pick up the pieces of broken clay.
She stands up straight, frowning slightly as she considers her answer. ‘I think, quite honestly, it’s a bit of a poisoned chalice,’ she says, eyebrows fixed. ‘I mean, I love it, but it’s a huge responsibility. I don’t feel like I have ever owned it, not really. I feel like more of a custodian, a steward.’
‘Would you ever sell?’
‘No, never ever.’ She shakes her head as if to clear the unwelcome image from her mind. ‘My ancestors walked the boards of Bryngwyn. I am so happy here. It’s my place of belonging.’
Within a few hours, we are back at the dinner table, where I am presented with a dinner of poached egg and ratatouille. I have been allergic to egg since I was a kid, but instead of confessing this, I cut it into small pieces, move it around my plate a bit and make ‘mmm’ sounds for ten minutes so as not to seem rude. What an idiot.
The discussion turns to coming-out ceremonies.
‘My father didn’t want me to go to university,’ Auriol says, pouring a can of Strongbow into a glass and taking a long sip. ‘He didn’t believe that girls should be educated, because then they might argue back, so I was sent off to finishing school in Verbier for six months. We learned to sew, cook, ski and speak French. I think we were given the oldest, ugliest ski instructor going’ – she looks at me, serious for a moment, before opening into a playful smile – ‘but of course we all fell desperately in love with him.’
‘I remember my sister being presented at court when she was eighteen,’ she continues. ‘My mother took a house in London for four months. We had to go to Buckingham Palace to sign a register to say that she was “in town”. We called it “coming out”. I was too young to be presented at court – that had all been done away with before I was eighteen – so I came out at the London Season.’
A custom since the late 1700s, the London Season attracted families from the upper echelons of British society, who would travel to London at the end of the hunting season for the purpose of introducing their teenage children into society with the hope of securing a match. The ‘debutantes’, aged seventeen or eighteen, would be given a formal introduction to the reigning monarch and a debut at a high-profile ball, followed by a season of extravagant parties and sporting events that would last for several months.
‘It was a marriage fair, really,’ she continues. I nod and fidget, desperately fighting the urge to rest my elbows on the table. ‘Party after party for a whole year. All of the parents would throw events in big, grand houses, or at places like Claridge’s, Ascot, and Goodwood. The pinnacle was the Queen Charlotte Ball, where all the young girls who were coming out that season had to curtsy to a big cake.’ She takes a puff on her cigarette and looks confused. ‘It’s all a bit odd when you think about it.’
The following morning, I watch Auriol dart all over the place, running from one task to another – answering emails in her office, taking calls to arrange weddings, shoots and charity events, helping Andrea the gardener, running errands, visiting tenants, checking on the land and meeting with staff – working late into the night and seemingly never stopping to rest.
She is easily distracted, so our conversation flits from one subject to the next, like a bird flitting from branch to branch. When she becomes uncomfortable with my line of questioning, she asks me about my plans for the year to come, or about my philosophy degree. ‘I think it’s wonderfully ironic that you are calling the aristocracy a subculture’ – she flashes me another of her playful smiles as we clear our plates away after breakfast – ‘but you must tell me more about Nietzsche.’
As soon as I begin a story, she becomes distracted. ‘Come and talk to me in the office,’ she says to me mid-sentence, before dashing out of the room.
Once there, she promptly orders a book on Nietzsche from Amazon. ‘I really should be showing you around the place, but I’m fascinated by this,’ she says – scrolling down Wikipedia to read about various German philosophers, squinting at one through her glasses for a short while before losing interest and skipping to the next. ‘I have a curious mind, you see.’
The telephone rings and Auriol receives a request from the local district nurses for a donation to the ‘leg club’ for the elderly. She offers a personal contribution and to host a charity dinner party. After the call she looks back over her shoulder at me. ‘One of the things I feel passionately about is that old people don’t get treated very well in our country, certainly not as well as people who have ten illegitimate children.’
I can’t remember the last time I heard the word ‘illegitimate’; I didn’t even know that was still a thing.
‘Now.’ Auriol spins around on her chair and looks at me straight on.
‘You should do goths for letter G, I think. What do you know about them?’ She smiles again, a warm ‘I am genuinely interested in what you have to say’ smile.
‘Well, I don’t know yet really, but I guess a starting point would be heavy-metal music—’
‘Ooo, I love heavy-metal music.’
I can’t help but laugh. ‘Really?’
‘Oh yes, love it. I’m interested in everything, really. My mother had a broad canvas too. She recognised that times changed. My father was very straight down the line, though, terribly strict.’
‘And P will be pagans?’ she asks as we wander back into the kitchen.
‘Yes, I’m going up to Stonehenge and—’
‘Oh yes, they built it on ley lines, didn’t they? I want to get someone in here to balance the ley lines of this house.’
Christine, who has been beavering around the Aga, looks up at us. ‘She’s a witch, you know.’ She looks at Auriol and they share a smile. ‘She has a dowsing pendulum and everything.’
Auriol grins and leans in, conspiratorially. ‘I do,’ she whispers.
Later that morning I head out to the gardens to help the head groundsman, who has worked for ‘Lady L’ for ten years. It takes us three hours to load up the pruned branches of one tree into a trailer, piling them on the other side of the land using a quad bike, a pick-up truck and a tractor. There are thousands upon thousands of trees here. I cannot even comprehend how difficult it must be to manage the upkeep of a place like this.
Tired, and smelling like someone who has been hauling branches for three hours, I walk back into the kitchen to the hustle of a Sainsbury’s order being delivered. It seems strikingly anachronistic to see a Sainsbury’s van parked on the driveway, and I pause for a moment to challenge my expectations here. I mean, what had I expected to happen? That the groceries would arrive by horse and cart in hessian sacks, delivered to the door by a Dickensian young boy with a face covered in flour? I realise that yes, this is exactly what I had been expecting, and deflate with disappointment.
I try to slip through the kitchen unnoticed, hoping for a reviving shower before lunch, but Christine beckons for me to sit at the kitchen table and puts me to work polishing the apples for the fruit bowl.
‘How do you polish an apple?’ I ask, the left side of my lip creeping up to meet my nose.
She returns my expression. ‘You don’t polish your apples?!’
‘Erm… no.’ I feel irrationally ashamed.
‘Well. It’s easy’, she says, picking up a tea towel to demonstrate. ‘You just rub them with a clean cloth until they shine.’
She hands me a tea towel and sits down next to me with a bowl of potatoes and a peeler.
‘Houses like this one used to be almost entirely self-sufficient,’ she explains as we work together on our respective tasks. ‘They would have a vegetable garden, wild game in the woods, a lake full of fish, and eggs from the chicken coop. Then anything that can’t be eaten – like acorns from the trees – would be sold or traded.’
The philosophy is maintained to this day at Bryngwyn: orange peel goes into the Aga to be dried out and used as kindling; plate scraps go out to feed the chickens; bones go to the dogs; jam jars are washed and refilled; and old glass bottles are used to make sloe gin and elderflower cordial.
Foraging was also commonplace on a country estate and remains so for Auriol, who often gathers nettles and mushrooms from the garden to eat. She has recently installed a ‘Poison Garden’ feature in the grounds, containing plants like the castor-oil plant, wolfs bane and hemlock, unlocking the long-forgotten common knowledge of what is and isn’t safe to eat.
Ten minutes of apple polishing later, I feel a sense of accomplishment as I arrange the gleaming spheres neatly in the fruit bowl, placing it in the centre of one of the huge dining-room tables. My reward is a bowl of Christine’s famous ‘fridge soup’, containing all of the leftovers from the previous week’s shooting party – spaghetti, fondant potatoes, cauliflower cheese, carrots, onion, cheese and a giant wedge of quiche – all mashed together, warmed in a big pot and served with a paving slab of fresh bread.
After lunch, and a much-needed shower, I waddle out of the kitchen to explore the rest of the house alone, expecting to find Narnia behind each door. The first gem I discover on my self-guided tour is an enormous billiard room with walls draped in war paraphernalia, antelope heads, Tibetan cymbals, an alligator head and the full skin of a Burmese python.
Everything is old here. The entire house is strewn with old books, paintings, china cabinets, tapestries, coats of arms, ceremonial swords, guns, statues, old jewellery, letters and photographs. I don’t really understand antiques – it all just seems like old tat to me – but Auriol loves them. ‘Oh, that’s terribly important,’ she’ll say, finding an old piece of paper or a trinket in a drawer and searching to find a place for it on a surface or in a display cabinet.
As the sun dips lower in the sky on my second day at Bryngwyn, I become increasingly nervous about what is going to unfold. Everybody has to be terrible at something in life, and my something is tennis. I never seem to have remotely got the hang of it. On the rare occasion my racket actually makes contact with the ball, I get so overexcited I end up hitting it onto the bonnet of a car parked six streets away. So, you can imagine my dismay when I am invited to make up a four for a doubles tennis match with Auriol and her two friends.
My inability to say no holds fast, and after a short disclaimer about how excruciatingly terrible I am, Auriol lends me a racket and we walk down the garden to the tennis court.
The game begins, and the ladies career around the court shouting ‘What fun!’ each time they manage to hit the ball, and ‘Bugger!’ each time they don’t. Yellow orbs whizz past my face as I try desperately to make contact with them – thwack. The ladies cheer each of my successful hits with equal vigour, despite more than half of them going over the fence behind us.
Enjoying my lack of hand–eye co-ordination, Faith the gun dog expertly fetches my numerous stray balls. Ducks fly over our heads and a gentle fog hangs over the green valley beside the court. Auriol spots me looking at the sky as a particularly noisy flock pass overhead. ‘Achingly beautiful, isn’t it?’ she says, covered in smiles.
The next day, twelve men descend on Bryngwyn for a day’s clay-pigeon shooting. I pull my curtains to see the driveway filled with half a dozen Land Rovers.
A typical bird day (‘proper shooting’) at a large corporate shoot will provide anywhere from 100 to 400 birds for a group of eight people, at the cost of around £42 per bird. On top of this, you pay for your cartridges, and £100 per day for somebody to stand next to you and load your gun. Needless to say, most shooters of this ilk tend to be successful businessmen, those of ‘private wealth’, and rich farmers.
Clay-pigeon shooting is much less of an assault on one’s bank balance, at £250 per head, thus attracting a more eclectic crowd of property managers, dentists and accountants. The group today are part of a syndicate, all (male) friends and family members of the ‘host’ for the day, i.e. the splendid chap who is footing the bill.
Auriol often has big CEOs at her ‘clay days’, with some shooting up to seventy-five days a year. She tells me about one particular customer, who started off in business by picking up small pieces of coal on the ground and selling them door to door. Now he is a multimillionaire coal-mine owner, and one of her biggest customers.
‘It took pure graft for him to get to where he is,’ she says. ‘I am in awe of people like him. I am humbled by them. I think they are an inspiration.’
‘Are people ever rude or obnoxious?’
She thinks for a while before shaking her head. ‘No, not really. The only thing I can’t stand is when people are rude to my staff, because they can’t answer back, and that’s simply not fair.’
Having been invited to join the shooters for the day’s session, I set about putting on my cobbled-together country clothes and follow the sound of chatter into the vast dining room. The men all look terribly important, and I feel wildly out of place, intimidated even. I turn back for the safety of the kitchen, hoping to eat breakfast with Christine and the staff, but Auriol walks over to stop me. ‘Just plonk yourself down next to anyone,’ she whispers, turning me around and gesturing towards the table.
‘This is Lucy Feltham,’ Auriol introduces me with my full (maiden) name as I take a seat at the table next to the youngest-looking man in the room. He smiles to welcome me.
‘Hi,’ I manage weakly.
‘Hello, Lucy, I’m Dean Curran’ – he turns to shake my hand – ‘nice to meet you.’
‘What brought you here today, Dean?’ I ask, hoping to sound more confident than I feel.
‘Well,’ he begins, turning back to look at me, ‘the son of today’s host is a childhood friend of mine, but I’m a bit out of place here, really.’ He smiles and lowers his voice to a near whisper, ‘I don’t shoot very often, and I’m not terribly good at it!’
I let out a breathy chuckle and feel my whole body begin to soften as I tuck my chair under the table and try not to look bemused by the array of cutlery before me. We continue to make pleasant small talk over a cooked breakfast, me carefully rearranging my egg into small pieces at the edge of my plate again, before we are all called outside for our safety briefing.
After a short ‘don’t shoot yourselves, or each other’ talk in front of the house, we step into a convoy of Land Rovers and make for the day’s first site. I can feel the orange juice and second helping of bacon swirling around my tummy with every bump in the road.
Once at the site, it takes no time at all for the men to expertly pull out their long guns and fire at the black clays hurled from a powerful machine at the top of the hill. After about forty-five minutes of shooting, we gather around a table for champagne, with a shot of damson gin in each glass. The drink is known as a damgasm, and it tastes just like its name. After two glasses I am feeling much more confident, and begin to enjoy networking among the men, sharing my story and listening to theirs in return. I am careful to ease my way in when giving examples of the subcultures I plan on exploring over the next year, deciding in this company to stick to fox hunting and pagans.
We move on to another round of shooting at a different location before it is time for ‘elevenses at the lake’: more damgasms, cauliflower-cheese soup, sausages, ginger cake… and even more damgasms. My tummy feels like a cement mixer.
Over elevenses I talk to Monty, who has been shooting for fifty-seven years. Monty wears a seemingly standard-issue flat cap, a blue shirt with a black gilet, and fawn corduroy trousers. He shoots around twenty days a year, mainly grouse, duck, partridge, pheasants, woodcock, pigeons and rabbits, but not hares, ‘Because I like to preserve them.’ I ask if I can load Monty’s gun for him as we gather for the next round of shooting. The cartridges pop out and hit me in the face when he snaps the gun open after each round, filling my nostrils with the smell of burning metal.
When the round is finished, we are offered a gin and tonic and taken to a collection of three-sided wooden pens nestled into the countryside, known as the grouse butts, and it is here that I fire my first twelve-bore shotgun. The shot kicks back into my shoulder with such force it almost sends me over backwards. I feel the rest of the group’s eyes on me and turn towards them sheepishly. They look at me for a second, reading my bemused expression before bursting out laughing.
‘Holy shit!’ I exclaim, enjoying my own naivety as I rub my shoulder and laugh along.
‘Keep at it, girl!’ Monty yells from his position on the far side, his eyes glued to the skyline.
After the grouse butts, we head back for lunch, a hot meal of beef and red wine stew, followed by freshly made blackberry cake and a cheese board, all washed down with lashings of wine. I have finally realised that ‘shooting’ is pretty much eating and drinking all day, with short intervals of standing in a field with a gun.
Feeling bloated and tipsy, I leave the party and heave my way up into Auriol’s Land Rover, headed for a nearby road to help her clear some pieces of clay. We sit in the car as the shooters take aim over a ridge ahead of us, listening to Classic FM and talking about the effect of politics on the landowning class.
‘It’s amazing,’ Auriol says. ‘Apparently, if the independence of Scotland had gone through, Salmond said nobody should own more than five hundred acres. Imagine that.’
She winds down the window to see if the men have finished the round.
‘What would happen?’ I ask.
‘It would be terrible for the economy. People have grouse moors, they have fishing, forestry and pheasant shoots. Then you have farmers, who have to buy equipment, and it’s not worth doing it for five hundred acres; it’s not viable.’
Auriol hops out of the car to pick up some loose clays. I follow her, hoping the fresh air will ease my creeping nausea of overindulgence. ‘In Scotland you also have the “right to roam”,’ she says, ‘which you don’t have here. Can you imagine if everybody could walk wherever they wanted? It would be a nightmare. They would litter, leave the gates open, the sheep would get out. Urban people make all the laws, but they don’t understand the countryside.’
I draw out my lips and suppress a frown. Surely, this land ownership stuff is all just made up anyway. Who says you own thousands of acres of land just because your ancestors put a flag in it hundreds of years ago? Especially while others have so little. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. This is what I should say, but I don’t. I like Auriol, and I want her to be my friend, so I smile and nod, wagging my metaphorical tail. I wonder if my journalistic courage will develop over time, and if I will have the guts to push back on statements like this later in my journey. I hope so, but this is all so new and think I’m still in survival mode, so I will just have to forgive myself for the tail-wagging for now. It’s hard being a stranger in somebody else’s world.
The shoot continues after lunch, with another break for champagne, ending with tea and cake back at the house at around 5 p.m. Oh, and more gin.
‘What tea would you like?’ Auriol asks me after she has served the punters. ‘India or China?’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘India is builder’s,’ she says to me, picking up one of the pots as if to say, ‘This is the one you’ll want.’
‘What is Chinese tea, then?’ I ask.
One of the shooters looks at me from the sofa and raises an eyebrow. ‘Earl Grey,’ he says, ‘which is from China. Black tea comes from India.’
‘Quite,’ Auriol says.
I shrug. We just have Tetley tea at home.
Later that evening, after the men have left, Auriol and I sit on the fire surround in the entrance hall. The embers glow next to us, warming our feet as Auriol sips at her Strongbow and I cradle a glass of red wine.
‘Are places like this dying out?’ I ask her.
‘Well,’ she looks up thoughtfully, ‘the genuine aristocracy, the landed gentry I mean – and some of them have huge estates, including property in central London – they generate an enormous amount of income, so they are beyond the point of being a headache. But small estates like this are a struggle.’ She strikes a match and lights another cigarette. ‘They are bloody hard work.’
From my experience of living with Auriol this week, I can attest to the truth of this, in her case at least. I have never seen anyone work harder than Auriol, who operates as more of a live-in estate manager than the lady of leisure I had expected, always searching for new and creative ideas to bring enough revenue into the house to keep the estate above water.
I stand by my conviction that the aristocracy is a subculture, a non-mainstream community who tend to stick together, a value system rooted in history and tradition, with all the accordant nuances of wardrobe and diction. ‘I think it’s wonderfully ironic that you are calling the aristocracy a subculture,’ Auriol had said to me earlier this week, and perhaps she was right. It is ironic that the once ruling class, who sat at the top of the mainstream pyramid, now seem to occupy their own unattainable bubble outside of it, continuing their traditional way of life tangentially to the fast-changing world around them.
The following morning, I switch my leather wellies for trainers, climb into my car and wind my way back up the long gravel drive. I think I expected to feel more alien here, in a world I can never truly be part of due to the circumstances of my birth – the ultimate FOMO – but I find myself sad to be waving goodbye to Auriol. She has been hospitable and kind, welcoming me into her home like an old friend without prejudice or judgement, which is more than I can say for myself.
Beaming from ear to ear, I pause for a moment to watch a couple of horses trot past the entrance to the estate. It is breathtakingly beautiful here, but this lifestyle just isn’t right for a terrible tennis player who doesn’t know one end of a shotgun from another, and for some reason this no longer sparks my FOMO. I am happy to know that this world exists, to have lifted the lid on it, but I’m also happy to finally cross something off my list.
Move aside, Fairy Godmother, Cinders is staying with her singing mice.
I open my phone and search for the nearest Harvester. If I hurry, I might just catch the Earlybird 2-for-1.