Due to the cancellation of Ha Ha Hammersmith (sorry to those of you who were looking forward to it - was nothing to do with me), I have the whole weekend off, for the last time until at least September. Woo hoo! Road trip!
I decided to get out of London, but with little idea of where to go I was reduced to the 21st century equivalent of Dr Doolittle's sticking a pin in an atlas and went on to google looking for a hotel. I had no idea where I wanted to go, apart from the fact that I didn't want to drive for hours, so looked in Hampshire and Sussex and Wiltshire, before finally looking at Oxfordshire, getting bamboozled by the choices and then bored and then finally just making the plunge and booking a room in a hotel in a town that I had never heard of before called
Deddington. I don't know if the name of the place was what appealed - it's either morbid or suggests that nothing whatsoever is going on - but it was kind of spooky to make an almost random decision, then get in my car and be in the place I had never heard of within a couple of hours. Just good to be away from home and having to think about work for a day or so.
I knew nothing about Deddington (that's not true, I had noticed that they had a co-op, cos I had a quick look at their website and they were boasting about it) and so had no expectations whatsoever and thus was not disappointed. I checked into my hotel and then went to walk round my home for the night, realising that I would probably only spend one night of my life in Deddington, unless like Bill Murray I experienced some kind of Groundhog Day, lived the same 24 hours over and over again and then once I had escaped the curse by living the perfect day, decide to buy a place here.
That didn't happen though.
Unless I lived the perfect day the first time.
There was something a little eerie about Deddington. It was hard to put my finger on it. It was like an old style village, but all the houses looked a bit too modern - though they were trying to look old school, but had clearly mainly been built in the last century. It seemed a bit too clean, a bit too quiet, it had a police station, which seemed wrong for a village of this size - plus the police station was like a little shop, with windows. Quaint, but slightly wrong. It had a friendly cut out of a policeman holding up opening times. I wondered if the cut out was actually the Deddington police force, and the local criminals had been fooled into thinking he was an ever vigilant copper who never went off duty.
I realised what was odd about it. The whole place felt a bit artificial. It felt like a film set. Like all the houses had no insides and with not enough people around to give an accurate portrayal of real village life.
There was an antiques shop there, which I had a look round as I was hoping to find a cheap trumpet for my show. There were four storeys of antiques, with each room themed - the children's room being particularly frightening due to the presence of clown dolls. It was still a great shop - more like a museum than a regular boutique - but no trumpet.
I wanted to look round the church, but there was something going on in there. Some might have assumed it was a wedding, but I wondered if all the villagers had heard there was a stranger in town and had gathered there to discuss how they should proceed in their plan to imprison and then burn him alive in a wicker man. It would explain why the streets were so empty and the weird looks that the people in the back row were shooting me as I peeked in the door.
I sat outside the Deddington Arms and drank a couple of pints of bitter and watched a lot of people driving by in old style sports cars. Either there was an event on nearby or there were a lot of eccentric, classic car owners in the area.
There was a hen night in progress further along the table, though it was, as yet, a restrained affair, merely involving T-shirts and a small amount of booze. But it was still early. Some male villagers had come down to the pub having heard about the hen night, sniffing opportunity.
It was just really lovely to have the sun on my face and so nutty beer in front of me.
I went back to my room and snoozed through Dr Who before heading downstairs for dinner. After a week of rigorous calorie control it was terrific to let myself go and have pizza and then ice cream. This was like a mini holiday. A holiday before ten weeks of solid work. A holiday in a town that I would never come back to. I could have done anything I wanted, let myself go. I behaved myself.
Thanks for having me Deddington. Hopefully this entry will send scores of tourists coming to your town.
If you go stay at
The Holcombe Hotel and ask for room 36. To add to the eerieness of the village, when you open the door expecting to find a room, there is in fact a windy stair-case which takes you up into the roof. Deddington has the unexpected around every corner. I actually wouldn't be surprised if someone emails me after this entry to tell me that the town of Deddington disappeared off the face of the earth exactly ten years ago today.
