Since staycations are so de rigueur this year the family and I thought we’d better join in. Luckily for us our good friend Marilyn has just moved back to Britain after a couple of years living in Hawaii and Portland Oregon. And she has returned to live in arguably her favourite part of blighty, the Cotswolds. So when she kindly invited us down for a week we started packing.
And what a fab place the Cotswolds is. Village after village of picturesque thatched cottages, and the birthplace of the Arts and Crafts movement ,which in the last years of the 19th Century promoted a return to individual hand crafted skills as an antidote to mass-production. (It’s still my favourite period for architecture and furniture).
I’m glad to report that the Cotswolds is still a thriving hub for artisans, today.
And to appreciate the work of a true artisan we only had to take a 10-minute stroll out of Farmington, the village Marilyn now calls home (so small it wasn’t even on our sat nav, but that’s another story).
Follow the signs up a little lane and you reach the local farm, which you discover, makes it’s own divine ice cream. And not just any ice cream: this is the uk’s only fairtrade ice cream; It’s also organic; and it’s produced from cow to carton in just one day. (You can see the organic herd chewing the cud as you head for the farm shop). But here’s the best bit. The “shop” is a freezer filled to the brim with cartons. And all you do is help yourself, and then pop the money in the “honesty box.”
We went every day (well you have to try all the flavours, don’t you?). And I counted about £40 in pound coins that they simply left out to help customers “make change” as Marilyn would say.
Isn’t it nice when you can still meet people who instinctively trust strangers?
When you discover a carton of Cotswold ice cream, buy it, it’s full of good stuff and so are its makers.

It’s art, an installation at Out of the blue, our new favourite meeting place. Brian’s got a leaky roof at the moment this could be a cool way to deal with it….

I absolutely love this photo taken by American photographer Doug DuBois. He was visiting his sister in New York when he noticed that her son had laid out his toy dinosaurs in a herd. I’ll let him tell you the rest:

“I was captivated. They reminded me of a shot I love: a child's-eye view of toys taken by the great French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. It took me about five hours to set up. I kept moving the toys to get the light perfect and to echo Lartigue's composition. I taped a load of Spencer's books into a pile and put my camera on top, but it kept moving. By the time I got it right, I was so angry I only took one photograph. That's madness! You never do that – not as a professional photographer. I use a 4x5, one of those big, heavy cameras with a black hood. The results are incredibly detailed.”
He can say that again, everyone I show this shot to thinks it’s a painting.
I find the image very positive and hopeful, the toys have a life of their own (I blame Toy Story) but Doug thinks the opposite:

“This shot makes me feel sad. It just looks like something is over: a childhood maybe, or even a life. It's also a reference to the march of the dinosaurs in Disney's Fantasia; they were marching towards extinction. The chair is very important, too, for scale, balance and a feeling of emptiness.
My photography is about the dissolution – and the disillusion – of family. There's something of that in these dinosaurs. People look at it and think: "Oh, that's nice." Then they look more and see it's –actually a dark, disturbing shot.”

Doug’ thinks this is his best shot.
I couldn’t agree more.