How we used to live

[hirez]

http://www.rabennett.co.uk/buy/property/3-bedroom-house-in-winchcombe,gl54-for-guide-price-gbp-700,000-ref-1793328/

How fucking much?

And they've completely destroyed the character of the place. 'Planning permission for a porch' - well it serves you right for pulling down the old one, doesn't it? Granted it probably didn't need that much pulling, but it was an ideal place to store a couple of weeks' worth of logs. Apparently you can also install a second bog. I believe that should read 'replace the bog that you threw out during the alleged 'sympathetic modernisation''. Sympathetic to what, exactly? Seventies Svensk pr0n? And. See that bloody stupid 'island' thing in the alleged kitchen? There should a Kawa GT550 in that space.

Honestly, let some people have a nice house and they ruin it. Still, at least the telly is in the traditional corner.

(Actually, I would lay odds that property-developer chap has run out of money. Ha!)

For those new to this game, I used to live there. It was a bit of a tip, but it was our tip. Where 'our' parses out to 'Set of people who grew up locally and quite liked the idea of being able to stick around and, y'know, contribute to the rural economy', rather than let it all go a bit Sevenhampton where the majority of houses are now second homes and belong to some fucker off the telly, some fucker from a bank or some generic execu-twat. Their contributions to the rural economy amount to a monthly visit to the pub for a Sunday lunch and lording it over the proles who have to live in the council houses round the back of Winchcombe and/or picking up a bag of Fairtrade coffee from the M&S at Reading services on the way up of a Friday. Yes, I know the Cotswolds have been where London-based twats who've made a bundle have pitched up to buy (or build) something charming since just after the Great Fire, but it still doesn't make it easier to bear. Actually, it was probably the Romans that started the rot. After all, there's a mosaic in the shed that you'll find in the middle of the field to the left of the place. And you probably wouldn't be going up the M4 unless you were going to the Cirencester end of the Cotswolds. Presumably those going up the M40 to their weekend retreats after a hard week of commissioning shit monkey-tennis teevee get their provisions delivered by Ocado.

Comments

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Thumbnail of photo 4 looks like there's a big hunk of steam engine in that room. Imagine my disappointment when it turns out to be some kind of torture device instead. Hmph.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

That view is amazing. But why is there a tiki hut in the yard? ;)

[meltie.livejournal.com]

I really miss the Cotswolds and your post sure ain't helping!

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

As it happens I went through Winchcombe earlier today.

I joked to Andi that I was performing a public service by trundling through the town in a green, muddy Series 2 Land Rover, thus providing Genuine Local Colour and enabling all the well-heeled residents to reassure themselves that they lived in the Authentic Countryside. There should be grants available for this sort of thing.

I saw a rather ominous planning notice at Winchcombe station. You know how Winchcombe station is actually in Greet, a completely separate village a mile up the road?

Not, it seems, for much longer. Soon it'll be conveniently sited on the north-east corner of the Winchcombe-Greet conurbation.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Poor Greet. I guess there'll be houses in the fields opposite the school.

I went to nursery school in Greet.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service.

It's an entertaining thing to consider a far more technical version of Humblebee. Three-phase and fibre-to-the-livingroom. What could possibly go wrong?

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

Isn't Humblebee semi-detached, i.e. there's an adjoining house next door? Or did I just breathe in a bit too much of the prevailing fog of jazz cigar that seemed to hang over the place like a nailed-down cloud?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yep. I think it belongs (or used to) to some part of Sudeley. When I first lived there, gamekeeper + SO lived there. Then they got booted out and it was a weekend pied-a-mixing-with-the-fucking-rustics for some related mob of hoorays.

IIRC the wee turds would troll up from whichever university (likely Bristol or Exeter) of a weekend and have it rah! They may or may not have beetled round on the hunt for ceremonial chemicals and been so teeth-achingly 'mixing with the proles oh tarquin how real' about it they were asked to piss off.

Um. Probably.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

They've gone to remarkable lengths in the ad, to hide the semi-detatched-ness. Lovely as Humblebee is, I doubt that anyone wants to pay three quarters of a million for a semi.

[aeia.livejournal.com]

How much money!!! Depressing how expensive anything is in the Cotswolds. Lucky for us we're not in the Cotswolds although I think technically we can see where it starts (the woods across the fields opposite us I think is the border).

[hirez.livejournal.com]

INORITE?

I was thinking about it the other day - somewhere like Worcestershire (and Pembrokeshire) are yer archetypal patchwork-of-fields as drawn in Rupert Annuals and are various shades of deep green and brown. The type of landscape within which any sensible non-urban type would wish to live.

The Cotswolds are paler because the ground's a bit crap and, certainly in my bits, there's more stone than soil, which makes the landscape look a lot more washed out and bit more blasted heath for the grim end of the year. And yet those grey remembered hills are home.

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

Deep green and brown and bloody chocking yellow! and round here increasingly pinstriped with plastic, as if someone had got all arty with the industrial cling-flim.

But yes, returning to your original point, absolutely. The exception is Wemys, who still facilitates real people in real homes. My folks' village has some life left in it, but I wonder what his kids will do with the place.

[meltie.livejournal.com]

That was basically my criteria for the current place. Close to a tram line too.

[meltie.livejournal.com]

I quite fell for Warwickshire too when I was beetling between Cheltenham and Sheffield twice a week.