28 Feb

Have been musing this morning on celebrity country dwellers. To be honest, they’re a bit thin on the ground here. Those that we do have, are, in the main, definitely your D or even E-listers. We aren’t really a terribly glamorous part of the country (not that I’m complaining). There seems to be some sort of collective country-wide amnesia as to where West Suffolk actually is; we’ve lost count of the number of times people have looked blank when we’ve said where we live and confessed to not being able to pin-point it. Not having terribly sexy credentials (we grow a lot of sugar-beet!) means the flow of A-listers looking for status houses hasn’t really happened. There are plenty of large country houses and some huge sporting estates, but few of them seem to have flamboyant – or famous – owners. Maybe there exists some of sort of celebrity hot-line – or maybe a secret celeb bloggers’ site! – where they compare the merits of various parts of the country , what the access is like for whatever it is that they need. It has been darkly muttered in our village that we even, in fact, have some sort of curse in place; for mainly historical reasons, our summer fete is quite a big event and we generally get some well-known (ish – it varies!) person to open it. Unfortunately, over the past three years, two of the invited guests died soon after cutting the ribbon (John Peel and Richard Whiteley), so maybe it’s just as well we don’t have a huge pot to choose from - we’d kill them all off. We do, however, have one very famous part-time resident – a German supermodel – who owns a huge ‘weekend’ estate very close by.

I’ve been thinking about these huge estates lately. I’m aware that many of the rich landowners who used to live in them would spend huge amounts of time in London, or abroad, or at their other homes, and I’m certainly not wistful for the days of exploitation and feudalism, but it seems that more than ever these huge country piles are removed from the local countryside and the lives of the locals. In previous times, I suppose, even if the ‘family’ weren’t in residence, there would still be a whole army of local staff employed in the house and grounds, and doubtless plenty of gossip flying back and forth. Now they just seem so remote and asleep. Not the ones which have turned into conference venues or hotels etc, but those still in private ownership. They must only get used for such a small fraction of the year; the one nearest to us is just a sort of upmarket party house. There is so much concern (rightly so, in my opinion) over second home owners in villages, yet everyone seems to forget or ignore the super-rich. Maybe it’s because they will always just be beholden to their own rules and really do live in a different universe.

Anyway, I wandered up to the village toddler group with K this morning. A woman was there whose husband is a local estate agent, and her news caused a little frisson of excitement in our gossip-starved lives. The German supermodel is reported to be selling up. Everyone started speculating wildly on who might be buying her house. Are we about to get some bona-fide A listers? Will Suffolk become the new Cotswolds? Can we expect chi-chi little boutiques and organic delis springing up in our agricultural villages? Could I become the new Jilly Cooper, writing about the lives of the rackety Suffolk set? I’m sure some people were frantically working out what the effect on house prices might be. Will it be Madonna and Guy? Elizabeth and Arun? Kate and Pete? Well, I can confirm that, happily for most of us who like things the way they are, Suffolk won’t become the new Cotswolds. I’m not sure that the house prices will rocket either however – rumour has it that the new buyers are Jordan and Peter Andre.