I REFUSE TO go away anywhere for the summer. Why on earth would I want to? Travelling to some overcrowded beach either in Cornwall or Corsica in the middle of the summer is madness – especially when you live somewhere as beautiful as this part of Shropshire. It’s like the reverse of the Parisians who all flee Paris in July and August – the one time you know you can get most people around for dinner – at a day’s notice – is in August. This is a relief as I subscribe to Graham Greene’s view that he hated to make any appointments more than two weeks in advance, and indeed refused to do so. As a writer, he felt it trapped him to a schedule.
Only yesterday evening I rang up a well organised local couple who live between London and Shropshire and are usually booked up months in advance. I’d just invited the people who are staying in the gatehouse over for dinner – the following night – and thought it might be nice to get some local company along. ‘Any chance of coming over for dinner – tomorrow’ I asked my friend over the phone at around 9.30pm, just after watching the news (9.45pm is about the latest you can call people as many go to bed around 10pm). There was a brief pause as he conferred with his wife. ‘Sounds great’ he replied. ‘See you around eight o clock’.
In many ways that is what I like about living in the country; somehow you feel you are outside the pressure cage of modern world. That is ever since my serene life changed when two ‘project development’ officers from Natural Power in Wales showed up at the Upton Cressett gatehouse uninvited about a month ago – brandishing maps, cameras and compasses – to say they were having a snoop around for the purposes of an ‘impact assessment’ survey they were doing for a wind farm project. These turbines would not only wreck the local landscape but they would be a wholly unwelcome industrial and man-made addition to a thousand year old historic landscape. Nobody around here wants them, yet the developers have the gall to call it a ‘community wind project’.
I have started to think that this modern compulsion to always make everything greener and faster – travel, Broadband width, renewable energy technology – doesn’t necessarily make anything better. If anything, it just adds to a sense of general panic, of being bullied into submission into accepting things like Renewable Obligation tariffs, which is one reason why I like living here in our medieval hamlet at Upton Cressett where mobile signal is patchy and sometimes it doesn’t ring for three days (I mostly have it turned off).
I always am amused when guests arrive at our gatehouse (which is occasionally let as well as being the home of the Upton Cressett Foundation literary retreat), go up to their rooms and then emerge about half an hour later with a look of horror on their faces when they realise they have no signal and are cut off from the outside world. Where’s the Wi Fi, they ask?
I then send them off in the direction of a converted cottage next-door which does have Wi Fi. Although these guests are paying good money to enjoy a mini-break or week’s holiday in a turreted Elizabethan gatehouse in unspoilt countryside, many end up spending most of their day sitting in this cottage hunched over their lap-top. I can’t see the point.
The magic of a hamlet like Upton Cressett is that it is like returning to the middle ages, only with satellite TV, four star plumbing, heating and water. I was quite proud the other day when one of the owners of the Aman hotel group came to stay and he walked into breakfast with a smile on his face and said, ‘This is the first time I have ever stayed in an English country house where the hot water pressure is actually better then in one of my hotels.’