Hello! Welcome to my newsletter for August/September 2020. In this issue:
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First trip since my birthday in May. We were almost unbearably excited. Packed a picnic. Packed our masks. Drove to a Surrey village and trekked into ancient woods. No sound but the snap of branches underfoot. Wide views of the North Downs. Sun flashing on a field waterlogged after rain, on a lone, distant car in a crease between the hills.
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Other wonders. Illegible milestones. An old name for the internet.
This bungalow, guarded by Anubis bunnies.
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Our ultimate destination was Titsey Place, a 16th century house in Oxted. Satnav, in the finest tradition of Not Quite Lost, took us to the motorway, then, on a stretch with no exit, announced we'd found the destination.
It wasn't wrong. The house was visible, a tower nestled in the hills, just a mile as the crow flies. But impossible to reach unless you had wings.
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With the satnav in disgrace, we resorted to the old ways. The 30-year-old atlas that we keep in the car because it's a big book, we can't bear to throw it away, and so it goes with us everywhere.
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Here's Titsey. What a pleasure to visit such places again. The grand, ordered spaces, their tranquil geometry, from the smallest trimmed hedge to the biggest landscaped fold.
I would have loved to explore the house but it was still closed. I peered in through the windows, into grand, silent rooms carefully dressed with period furniture. While in lockdown sleep, they had acquired other uses.
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A ballroom had a ping-pong table. A sitting room had an open box of croquet mallets and a set of Pictionary. The desk in the library was piled with horticulture books and box files. The staff must have colonised it when it had to close. How glorious, to have that handsome house to themselves. And at the same time, so precarious to be running on empty.
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