Tweed & Tattersall

This week kicks off the most wonderful time of the year, in my mind. It’s the beginning of horse-racing season. In the UK, this season is launched with the massive Cheltenham Festival of Racing. For 51 weeks of the year, Cheltenham is a small Regency town nestled in the Cotswold hills,but for Festival week, more than 237,000 people arrive to take part in the racing. A huge contingent of more than 20,000 arrives from Ireland, as there are a significant number of Irish-bred horses and jockeys racing. Of course, the Guinness Racing Village is an attraction, too!

Special steam trains come from London bringing racing fans who bet millions of pounds during the week. That’s one thing that was fun about living in the UK: I could bet on anything and everything. I even went to the local betting shop to put down a fiver on the Kentucky Derby and Preakness.

The races are broadcast live via some of the betting sites like Paddy Power (it’s Irish!) and BetFred, but you have to do a bit of fiddling to be able to watch and bet if you have a US-based IP address. Luckily, I know the way around that obstacle and time my Friday lunch hour to coincide with the running of the biggest race of the Festival… the Gold Cup. And using my UK bank account, I put a couple of pounds down on a favourite, like Sam Waley-Cohen, an amateur jockey who won the Gold Cup several years ago (and who fell in the Maryland Hunt Cup, a much harder race!).

The other attraction of these races is seeing what everyone wears. When I used to go to the races at Chepstow, the course closest to where I lived in Wales, the dress of the day was something that kept you warm, something that kept you dry, and something to keep the sun out of your eyes. That generally meant wool trousers, waterproof boots, a heavy cashmere sweater, a long Barbour coat and of course, a hat. Unlike some of the other races, like Ascot, Cheltenham doesn’t have a dress code, although there is a preponderance of tweed and Tattersall. And hats.I much prefer the looks above to this look.

Wednesday is Ladies Day when all of the crazy outfits come out. Even though it’s still bloody chilly in the Cotswold hills this time of year, women arrive in skimpiest of summer outfits.

I have a Pinterest board called “What to wear to the races… or not”, so be sure to follow along for the next few days, here.

I love this picture of the Queen’s grand-daughter Zara Philips-Tindall, although she doesn’t look too thrilled about being kissed.

A Country Garden in a Late Winter Snow

I took advantage of a brilliantly sunny and almost warm day to head up to the country garden to take some pictures. While I got about eight inches of snow, just 10 miles north, they got more than 10 inches, which limited our walking around a little. Snow hides a lot of sins, and after a horror story I heard over the weekend, I didn’t want to risk falling!

I love this allée of trees and the beautiful bronze stag at the beginning and the bench and urn at the end of it.

The stag is really a gorgeous piece and sits on a plinth, surrounded by evergreen, although you can’t quite see it here.

There were remnants of the glorious garden in the summer and these wisteria branches almost reminded me of antlers over a ranch gate out west.

All of the garden’s benches invited you to sit a spell and have a chat, but we soldiered on.

All around the property, you see stone sculptures tucked in unexpected places.

Everywhere we walked, we saw that something had been there before us, including rabbits and foxes.

We stopped by to say hi to the cow (or steer), who came over to say hey to us and seemed very interested in Michael’s hat.

The barn was looking gorgeous in the sunlight and the snow. I can’t wait until it gets a little warmer and we can get to work on a super-secret project in there for later in the spring.

I love this view, I think it’s my favourite vista on the property.

Hope you had a great weekend, too!

Snow Daze

The poor children in our area are completely out of snow days this school year, mainly due to some mis-guided closings. But this storm was forewarned, so we were fore-armed and knew that almost everything would be closed.

Several years ago, I was given a sweet stone bunny by my friends at Pennoyer-Newman, and I use it as my snow gauge.

As the snow piles up, I take pictures and post them on the #SnowBunnyCam.

The tips of his ears are about 12 inches, so this looks like about eight inches of snow. Of course, Connor adores the snow and is just panting to get outside in it. It was snowing so hard today, I made him wear his coat. That way, only his head gets wet.

He walks in prescribed patterns around the back yard, and in some spots that don’t get a lot of sun, the snow from the past few storms is still pretty high. He loves sitting in the snow, and when he did this last year, someone suggested he might be numbing some pain, but I am pretty sure that’s not the case.

My chandelier is still hanging out back and is snow-covered now. It’s too wet to light the candles, but I am sure it would look like a scene from Dr. Zhivago!

I made a little video today.

The day wasn’t just me watching Connor out back, I also baked bread (pre-made by the local kosher market and frozen), and worked on my second cashmere quilt.

What did you do on this snow day? Or did you even have one?

World Book Day 2015

March 5 is World Book Day, and if you’ve been reading Pigtown*Design for any amount of time, you know I am a total bibliophile. The houses where I grew up had great libraries and I’d spend hours in there, poking through my father’s books. And in my houses, I’ve always had bookcases filled with the books I’ve collected over a lifetime.

The earliest book I remember we hand-me-downs from my cousins, my siblings and I being the youngest set of 28 first cousins. There were poetry books by A.A.Milne, including Now We Are Six, and When We Were Very Young. I can still recite bits and pieces of these poems that I learned all those years ago. These were the books with the beautiful evocative illustrations by E.H. Shepard, not the hideous Disney ones.

When I got old enough to read on my own, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, and I still do. I read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and all of the other serial books that were popular. One of my favourite books was Harriet the Spy. Another one I loved with the crazily-named From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

Since my father worked in a museum, and we had the run of the place, this book always resonated with me.

There have been periods when I’ve read less than at other times, but if I am sitting still, I am probably reading something. I love sitting at breakfast on Saturday mornings reading the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal, both of which have excellent weekend sections.

Of course, I have dozens of great decorating books, which I love to slowly peruse and examine the details in each of the rooms. I am not much for styling my bookshelves, although it does happen!

You can’t even imagine how happy it makes me to work in a place with a stacks library with more than 50,000 books. Each time I venture up there, I find something new… and it’s not always books. Our ghost occasionally leaves me things to find like portraits and old picture frames.

In honour of World Book Day 2015, I hope that you will share your best-loved books in the comments!

Happy St. David’s Day (A Wee Bit Late)

St. David’s Day is the Welsh equivalent of Ireland’s St. Patrick’s day, although celebrated in a much more restrained way, with some singing of Cwm Rhondda, the Welsh national song, otherwise known as Bread From Heaven and maybe drinking the local brew, Brains Beer.

It’s ten years this month since I moved to the UK, first working in London, and then in Wales, a country that’s not well-known, but can be described as the Appalachia of the UK. For many years, it had a strong coal mining economy, but during the Thatcher years, that all ended. As in Appalachia where there are hills and hollers, in Wales, families live in the Valleys, deep in the hills, where Welsh is still the preferred language.

Right after I arrived, Wales was playing Ireland in a massive rugby game, and we had tickets. Picture this if you can – a stadium filled with 70,000 rugby fans who had come from all over Wales and Ireland for this final match. And then picture the vast majority of these fans singing hymns and Tom Jones songs, while waving inflatable leeks and daffodils. They sing nearly the entire game, and it’s actually pretty fabulous to hear.

Wales has a huge history of singing. Every colliery, or mine, had its own men’s choir and at the end of the summer, there’s a huge festival of Welsh language and culture called an Eisteddfod where groups come from all over Wales to compete and sing. If you’ve ever seen the movie, “How Green Was My Valley” about a Welsh mining town, you will see how the men sing all the time.

Wales is surrounded by the “Ring of Iron” a series of more than 400 castles which protected it from the sea to the west and England to the east. Funnily, the most comprehensive list is maintained by someone in Baltimore. While most of these castles are now ruins or gone completely, some still remain, including the castle where I worked, St. Donat’s Castle, a 12th century castle on the top of cliffs overlooking the Bristol Channel.

It was owned by newspaper mogul William Randolf Hearst, who expanded it to about three times its original size by buying buildings across the UK and Europe and glomming them onto St. Donat’s. You can see pictures of St. Donat’s here and here. You can see pictures of my ten favourite Welsh castles here.

On my last trip, I only visited Castell Coch, a 19th century Gothic Revival castle, just outside Cardiff. Andy, the children and I zipped up for a quick photo op, racing the setting sun.

If you’re in Baltimore, you might see this symbol of Wales on the back  of my car.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!