more good times in Upper Slaughter

Sat­ur­day evening, we arrived back at the hotel at a glo­ri­ous time of day, that late after­noon slant­ing blinky sun­light that then retreated behind clouds and cooled off the day. The girls ran around in the fore­court of the hotel play­ing “Pony Show.” I was the judge and had to call for “Walk, all walk,” and “You are being judged at the can­ter, all can­ter,” finally award­ing the first and sec­ond prizes to the rid­ers. Avery dis­cov­ered that can­ter­ing with­out a pony but with a bruised coc­cyx is not all that much fun, so they sub­sided. Then in the dis­tance we saw a baby tod­dling about on the grass, pur­sued by its par­ents and a stroller loaded with parcels. Since Ava is a new sis­ter, and Avery misses Jane, they ran over and made friends. A lovely Hun­gar­ian fam­ily spend­ing, I would guess, a semes­ter teach­ing at some Eng­lish uni­ver­sity. Just a dar­ling baby, full of social vim and vigor, and she thor­oughly charmed the big girls who played games to enter­tain her. I must remem­ber to email the par­ents copies of the pic­tures, because as you can see they turned out extra well. It reminds me of the time, long ago in New York, when John and I bought a long antique bench and had to walk it home down the side­walk, paus­ing now and then to rest. Months later, an enve­lope arrived in the post con­tain­ing two 8x10 pho­tographs of us, car­ry­ing the bench and sit­ting on it out­side our apart­ment door. There was a Ger­man post­mark, and all we could think was that some Ger­man tourist had found our jour­ney amus­ing, and was kind enough to send us copies of their pictures.

At din­ner time, we dis­cov­ered the beauty of hav­ing two chil­dren who are 10 years old: they can be left in the room with room ser­vice while you adults go down to the fab­u­lous din­ing room for a fancy din­ner. Per­fect. Each girl got in the bath­tub and got clean (sep­a­rately, some­what sadly for me: they are too old to take baths together any­more!), and then we ordered roast chicken and French fries for them, which were ele­gantly deliv­ered under sil­ver domes, very impres­sive to the girls. They bun­dled up in the white tow­el­ing robes pro­vided by the hotel and lay on their stom­achs to watch telly and eat their din­ner. Then John I slipped out, exhort­ing them not to stand on any­thing except their feet, and to be care­ful and good. We went down to the warm, can­dlelit din­ing room and had such a nice time, just the two of us. I real­ize it’s nice that we have a child well-behaved enough, and good-enough com­pany, that we like to have din­ner with her, but there’s some­thing dif­fer­ent about our­selves when we get to be just on our own. It was lovely.

And the food! I started with, guess what, pan-fried foie gras with aged bal­samic vine­gar. Seared to per­fec­tion and but­tery melting-soft inside. With a very unusual side of tamarind ice cream, and per­fect focac­cia with tape­nade. John had some­thing I had always wanted to try but was a lit­tle wary of order­ing myself: veni­son carpac­cio. Paper-thin slices of raw veni­son served with a lit­tle frisee salad and a horse­rad­ish cream, and it was absolutely lus­cious. The veni­son had been rolled in an herbed pep­per before being sliced, which added a great fla­vor but did not over­whelm the meat. To fol­low, I had a per­fectly pink “Old Spot” pork ten­der­loin, sliced thickly, in what was to me a rather odd vanilla sauce, but I could see that it was won­der­ful for what it was. John’s father, who will eat any­thing that tastes of vanilla, would have been in heaven. I enjoyed it, how­ever. John had roast duck that was crispy on the out­side but nice and rare-ish on the inside, which hav­ing done duck now at home, I can tell you is not easy to achieve. I must say, though, that when it came time to choose the pho­tos for this post and I saw “ducks” next to “duck salad” in my menu of pic­tures, I could almost hear Avery’s voice at the river ear­lier in the day say­ing, “Look at these cute lit­tle crea­tures! Now tell me you could order duck for dinner!”

In between courses John checked on the girls, who had put them­selves to bed and were perus­ing, once again, the clas­si­fied pony ads, poor things. At least Avery is poor. Ava has a pony in York­shire, but even so, she and Avery felt on the same page as far as depri­va­tion goes: nei­ther of them has a pony liv­ing in her gar­den in Lon­don, how sad! We came back to the room after din­ner and they shortly set­tled down, while John and I relaxed with a warm­ing glass of Calvados.

In the morn­ing we had another glo­ri­ous break­fast, fed the ducks AGAIN and then headed toward home, stop­ping in Wood­stock for lunch at the White Hart, where I had really good bangers (pork and leek, a tra­di­tional favorite) and mus­tard seed mash, John had a per­fectly accept­able ham and stil­ton sand­wich, and the girls had awful kid-pub food. A happy ride home (albeit marred by yet more rep­e­ti­tions of Suzanne Vega), and reluc­tantly we took Ava home. Jill and Mylo were just mak­ing a cup of tea, so we accepted their invi­ta­tion and sat down for a chat while the girls made the most of their unex­pected reprieve from sep­a­ra­tion, rac­ing up to Ava’s bed­room. We all talked the usual top­ics: senior schools, how much we like the head­mistress, and our per­fect chil­dren. Finally we dragged them apart from one another and headed out. Just as we left, Mylo asked, “You know, I won­der how many peo­ple think you’re the painter John Cur­rin.” We remem­bered, laugh­ing, that Avery’s horse trainer in New York had been extremely stroking of John when we first met, really fawn­ing over him in a com­pletely odd way, and then one day he said, “You are THE John Cur­rin, the painter, aren’t you?” Oh, too bad! John broke up when I showed him the paint­ings. Yes, ever so slightly a dif­fer­ent per­son from himself.