GILES: The Daily Mail has finally run a piece about the oestrogenisation of the water supply. It’s something I’ve been banging on about for seventeen years, when my eco-chum Mike drew it to my attention that the polar bears in Antarctica had begun to show intersex features and deformed genitalia. Even as far away as Antarctica the oestrogen (an exquisitely potent hormone which resists filtering during water recycling) from the ‘developed’ world was making its mark. But as I said to Mike, ‘You don’t have to go to the Antarctic. Think of every married couple we know. The man is slaving away in the kitchen while the woman is holding forth at the top of the table.’
MARY: I agree with most of Giles’s eco-ranting. I’m just too busy to rant myself. And it’s clear that all the contraceptive pills and hormone replacement therapy going into our water supply are taking their toll. It’s good that 2016 man is in touch with his feelings and can cry and be metrosexual but name me a butch man in British public life today who exudes the same levels of testosterone as did Sir Winston Churchill, Errol Flynn or Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor – Mick Jagger? David Beckham? Boris is the exception that proves the rule.
I’m not saying I don’t welcome the feminisation of men. It’s just as well it’s happening simultaneously to the masculinisation of women. Remember the days when women fainted and screamed and stood on chairs if they saw mice? In films they were always clutching jewel boxes and being hysterical when fires broke out. They cowered during dramas and let the men take charge.
But could women have ever actually been so weedy in real life? Well, only fifty years ago Audrey Hepburn’s vital statistics were 34-20-34 and she had a tinkling melodious voice, while my own body is a continuous column 40-40-40 and my voice can turn really corncrake under stress. I have read that constant rushes of adrenaline, as a woman tries to compete in a man’s world, send spurts of testosterone into her body. Also, because men lack imagination, the woman has many more rushes of cortisol, the fear hormone, which is closely allied to testosterone.
GILES: The whole village seems to be enthralled by the Keanu Reeves-lookalike Dave Dewey the thatcher, who is currently tackling our end of the cottage thatch. The traffic has even increased as women seem to be taking the long way round after they’ve dropped their children at the local school so they can ogle him.
Mary had to forcibly stop me from putting out three large ‘NO LOITERING’ signs I had prepared and was about to position on the roadside complete with circular arrows to suggest traffic, both human and vehicular, should keep moving. Mary said that the whole point of living in a village is that we are supposed to celebrate the slow quality of life versus the dog-eat-dog rat-race of the city.
The previous thatcher, Royston Stagg, was a smoker and a superb thatcher who worked thoroughly at the pace of vegetative growth. He could be said to have invented slow thatching and took frequent cigarette breaks in his station wagon parked in our field gate, dreamily puffing and gazing contentedly at the vista of downland in the distance. This suited us well; it gave us time to earn the money to pay him. We gave him frequent cups of tea as well to add more leisure time. Oddly our neighbour Polly got in the act as well.
Polly next door in the terrace never conferred with us regarding the timing of our own tea-making ceremonies so even more delay ensued as poor Royston, who had just scaled a thirty foot ladder, with all the effort of John Noakes scaling Nelson’s Column, would be hailed by Polly for another cuppa. ‘Roy-stern? Roy-stern? Roy-stern? Where are you lurve?’ she would quail through the beech hedge. ‘Cuppa tea lurve?’
With infinite patience and kindness the breathless thatcher would reply, ‘Down in a mo, Polly.’
MARY: To this day Giles frequently shouts to himself ‘Roy-stern? Roy-stern? Roy-stern?’ for no particular reason, but often while washing up or sweeping the floor, and even though dear Polly is now pushing up daisies in our village graveyard and Stewart, whose family have been thatching in a continuous line for three hundred years, has shut up shop and retired.
GILES: As to the quality of thatching straw? Reed, which is traditionally used in Devon and Norfolk, would seem a better choice since it grows in an aquatic environment, but it’s all long straw, derived from wheat crops, in this arable district. It was a cheap and available roofing material in the days when labour was cheap and carter’s lads were whipped cruelly by their masters. But, just as bread is today nutritionally deficient compared to the ‘staff of life’ it represented in our grandpa’s day, so I believe that straw is not what it once was. The tendency to give the wheat a boost with artificial nitrogen makes the straw more sappy, more watery and have less dry matter compared to organic straw. But then, organic straw would send the roofing bill soaring by an extra £10,000.
‘Country life? That’s going to cost you,’ according to Martin Ellis, a housing economist at the Halifax writing in The Times today. ‘The countryside continues to attract homeowners inspired by open spaces, a cleaner environment and the prospect of a potentially greater quality of life.’
However, the reality is that Fleur, our eldest daughter seems to have become allergic to thatch and sneezes uncontrollably if she is in the cottage for more than thirty-six hours. As is my elderly volcanologist friend and neighbour who lives on the other side of the Downs. Roswitha can only partake of tea and cake outside the cottage and while sitting in our spinney. I am disillusioned with thatch. Warm duvet in winter it ain’t; cool duvet in summer it ain’t, but it can be guaranteed to attract every sort of fauna into the home, including wrens, bats, squirrels, shrews, mice or worse as they come in their hordes seeking a refuge from the inhospitable prairies outside.
Dave Dewey is a great thatcher and craftsman who straddles the class divide between the Wiltshire indigenous folk and the incomers or ‘yuppies’, as the natives refer to us. He is a social chameleon who has mastered both dialects and slides effortlessly into whichever one befits his interlocutor. His film star looks are still stopping traffic. Tall, dark, lean and angular, he doesn’t carry a shred of extra poundage on account of spending his days shinning up ladders with sheaves of thatching straw. He carries antiquated tools such as billhooks for fashioning hazel spars and ledgers to bind the thatch. Thatching is a traditional craft where there are no short cuts, which is why thatchers are usually trim.
Gardeners, on the other hand, have quad bikes and, freed from the tyranny of sweeping leaves by using petrol blowers, are becoming increasingly rotund in appearance as are many of the traditional labouring classes. We see evidence of this every year at the annual Steam Fair at nearby Rainscombe, where antique tractors, train engines and animal traps are on display. Each year, an increasing preponderance of BMIs in the Overweight or Obese categories signal how toilers in the field have been replaced by the modern machine.
As brawn and sinew are replaced by subcutaneous lard, it’s no wonder that the Wiltshire people are sometimes nicknamed ‘lardy cakes’ after the famous animal-fat rich pastry available from our local bakery, which, once tasted, becomes addictive.
Not me, of course. I do everything by hand.
MARY: Dave Dewey was banging and moving on the scaffolding all around the window of Room Two from about eight in the morning, even though I had the curtains down and could easily have still been asleep. We had Louise and Gretel (wife of Ben Goodall) over to lunch. Louise is a benevolent local landowner who, for some reason, enjoys coming to our cottage and washing up.
Gretel and I are the best of friends despite our husbands being engaged in the Easel Wars. Like the Schleswig-Holstein Question, the Easel Wars are a complex set of diplomatic and other issues whose origins are lost in the midst of time.
Giles always tries to find out what is the latest smart commission Ben is currently undertaking. So he joined us for lunch. Giles lit a log fire for us and cooked first-rate fishcakes using smoked haddock and coley, before going into the garden to allow us to thrash through some issues. When I mentioned that our thatcher was very glamorous Louise said, ‘Oh. I wonder if he’s the one who’s going out with Virginia Smail. I know she has a new boyfriend who’s a thatcher. I wonder if it’s him.’
I went outside on the pretext of talking to Dave about the weather and if he thought it would hold long enough to allow him to complete the job. He was standing by his truck fiddling with some string and he asked if my guest was OK with where she was parked as she seemed to be a little bit uncertain where to put her BMW. ‘Well it’s surprising if she was uncertain,’ I said. ‘That’s Louise Brewer. She’s been coming here for thirty years. You may know her if you follow the hunt.’
‘Well,’ volunteered Dave Dewey. ‘I should do. Or I will soon in any case. My new girlfriend is chairman of the hunt.’
‘Really?’ I feigned surprise.
‘Yeah – well we come from very different worlds as you can imagine. But I’ve met her parents and it went OK. Nice bloke, Her dad.’
Louise was fascinated when I went inside. Giles suddenly appeared in the room to advance his theory that cases of migration between classes are rare in Wiltshire where, according to Giles, ‘we seem to want a class-ridden society unlike most Britons who say they don’t. This is because this area still has Big Houses and still needs people to work in them. Deference, therefore, where deference is due, i.e., not to ‘Rock Squires’ and the like, still hangs on in the satellites to the Big House.’
‘That’s absolute rubbish, Giles,’ said Louise Brewer, ‘and all in your own mind.’
And to do with him being stuck in the Seventies.
