last of the summer whine

I walked into the bar at the hotel earlier this evening. Three other women were speaking English in the corner so I got a drink and went to join them. It turned out they had all downshifted to Yorkshire like I had. ‘Well, I said, ‘I never thought I’d get away on holiday, but my husband said he’d look in on the children from time to time and here I am with a lovely glass of Chateau de Chassilier'. ‘Oh darling', said the woman to my left, ‘I quite understand. My husband is away so much I have to tell the au pair what to do all by myself!’ I sighed. ‘My husband works in London’, I said, ‘and I only see him occasionally.’ The woman opposite me entered the discussion: ‘That’s nothing!' she said, 'My husband commutes to New York every day and then spends twenty two hours a day at the office before he comes home to write his northern downshifting novel’. ‘You’re lucky!’ said the woman on my right. ‘My husband works in the international space station, and you try running your own private equity firm and doing stunts for Bruce Willis after a twenty thousand mile commute!' ‘How often do you see him?’ I asked. 'I would see him tonight’, she sighed, 'but it's cloudy.' I looked down at my glass. ‘You know when we moved to the north we couldn’t find any glasses so we had drink the Nuits Saint Georges out of coffee mugs for the first week’, I smiled. ‘You were lucky!’ said the lady to my right. ‘Our builders didn’t even leave enough of a gap in the pantry for the wine cooler so we had to put the Chablis in the normal fridge when we downshifted!' ‘You were lucky!’ came the reply from across the table. ‘We used to DREAM of having a pantry! But the wind turbine that powered the authentic eco friendly Georgian electric sliding doors got refused planning permission so we had to tie the wine to the bullbars on the front of the range rover and drive around the village at a hundred miles an hour every night whilst reading a bedtime story to the children in the back seat just to cool it down!' ‘Luxury!’ came the reply. ‘We couldn’t even move into our house when we downshifted as the two houses we bought hadn’t been knocked through yet! How can a family live in one house?!’ We all shook out heads. ‘But’, the first lady said, ‘I'll tell you something, it’s so grim up north that if you tell people about it on a blog they won’t believe ya!'