If I were a wordsmith..

Dear Dreamers, 

If you know me, and I reckon you do by now, you know that-

 I like brick buildings, I love stone buildings.

 I like cobbled streets, I love cobbled alleys.

 I like coffee, I love a café on a cobbled street by a stone building across an alley ending in a whitewashed building with a metal balcony railing.

So imagine my surprise when I saw this.

And then this...

Really its quite unfair that one place gets all of this. This may very well be the architectural equivalent of  Aishwarya Rai or Miranda Kerr . I know nature and mountains makes some of you feel like this. …(now you get it). But the joy of walking around and touching these sights and all secrets and history they hold, makes me positively gleeful.  What Jane Austen heroine had pulled up in a horse drawn carriage here? What WWII spy had used this telephone booth to deliver a coded message? What part of Churchill’s formidable life had passed through here? And I could go on and on..                                                                               

Oxford College Quadrangle

If London was enough to make me weak in the knees, wait  till I meet Oxford and Cotswolds. We took a day trip to from London- touching Stonehenge, Oxford and Cotswolds. And while
 I admit I was slightly underwhelmed by Stonehenge, (apparently I’m not interested in stones unless used to make buildings or cobbled into streets). We made it to Oxford with a strict timeline of an hour to spend there. (I can go on and on about the streets and the buildings, but I’d still like an audience by the end of this post). So we did a quick walk through the campus, around the lazy strollers and the bikers going through town, feeling the rare air of the oxford IQ and the Oxford University Press and the sudden surprising beam of light on the green grass overlooking the college quadrangle. As we pull out of Oxford, we are a little skeptical about going to Cotswolds. We are losing sunlight and still have a better part of an hour to drive too, and really after taking in everything we have today, what else can really amaze us? But we keep calm and course along.



Cotswold is about a 45 minute drive from Oxford, and we get there soon enough. It’s a cluster of villages built on the rolling hills of Cotswold, with houses build from the Cotswold stone. I’m not sure where they get their name from, but I can tell they are keeping their options open.  We drive through the villages aiming to land at Bibury, one of the hamlets- ( I’m not sure it’s really a hamlet, but I’m on a Victorian roll here, so cut me some slack) and then loop out of there.

If you know the Dalvi girls, you know that quiet and speechless are not words used to describe us often/ ever. But for once the car was quiet. The long winding road, the green spring leaves adorning the path like a caress and the evening light breaking though the branches. 

Now, Hansel and Gretel makes sense. Little Red riding hood makes sense. Even Goldilocks makes sense. Every single story you grew up listening to- the stone houses, the wooden gate, the thick chimney, the ‘ just the right amount of overgrown garden, the purple wildflowers, the little stream. They are all right there, tucked away into their little corner of this world, unbeknown to most of us.

My mother, on her travels through Great Britain and Scotland, famously said, “Anybody who is born around this greenery and rolling hills and meadows would become a Wordsworth or a Tennyson” .  I don’t know if they would become one, but they would certainly like to try.

Cheers

S

p.s. I checked- Cotswolds gets it’s name from the stone.