JD Vance, we hear, is holidaying in the Cotswolds — so last week I got out just in time. We were there visiting friends who live (mercifully) in a less fashionable part of the area. And a lovely time we had with them. But to get there we had to drive through the most sought-after parts. Since everybody now seems to be talking about the Cotswolds, here are my notes on these unmemorable not-quite hills.

First, as my fellow notebooker Hilary Rose noted last week, nobody really knows where they are, being a landscape with little stature, as if some properly high hills had been given the once-over by some sort of celestial garden roller. They neither begin nor end anywhere but just fizzle out. Second, the fashionable bits verge dangerously on the suburban; not totally countryside and jammed with traffic congestion as rich people drive around purposelessly in huge, silly SUVs. It can take hours to get anywhere. Third, the little towns and villages built in yellow stone are quite sweet.

To sum up: one suspects everyone wants to live there mainly because everyone else has gone to live there. And that’s it, really. The Cotswolds. Perfectly nice, nothing special. Full stop.

Do bring a bottle

Another fellow notebooker, Janice Turner, has really got me rattled. Recently she described adjusting to London life after a Doncaster upbringing, and learning that, as a dinner guest in smart society, one doesn’t bring a bottle. Oh dear. I do. Always have. Or flowers. I’ve been bringing bottles for 50 years — usually of wine, occasionally of Dr Trouble from Zimbabwe, the best hot sauce in the world. If my hosts have thought the less of me for these gifts, I’ve never noticed it. And a footnote, therefore. If anyone coming to my London flat (though I don’t cook and hardly entertain) would like to bring a bottle of plonk, please do. All gifts gratefully, even bibulously, received.

What a vintage

My very first bottle, brought by me to an undergraduates’ party in Cambridge in 1969, looked vile. It was a last-minute purchase from a pub called the Still & Sugarloaf and something about the grubby label (and the price) suggested undrinkability. In my final year at university, 1972, I encountered what I’m sure was the same bottle, looking even grubbier. And in that moment I learnt some basic economics. My bottle had become a kind of currency, like conch shells in the South Pacific. Essentially useless (as is gold), it had come to serve a single function: something to take to a party. Duly received, its value to a host was that it could be passed on as payment for a place at the next party. My bottle was about as useful as a £10 note: valueless as a piece of paper, valuable because by one of those unspoken conventions that hold a society together, it has been deemed to have an agreed value.

Off the rails

Now, let’s test your marketing skills. You run a railway. You’ve ordered a new generation of trains. Somebody, at some point, has got the specifications hopelessly wrong. The entire stock (some 54 trains) has been stuck for a year, mothballed, in sidings, possibly in Spain.

Your passengers are getting restive as tatty, obsolete old carriages are taken out of service and services are cut. All you can promise is that you hope to have one of the new, now-modified, trains in service by the end of September and will (hopefully) introduce the rest gradually during 2026.

Now, write me a press release putting the best possible spin on the dismal news. Actually, don’t bother, as Transport for London have done so: here’s a message from Stuart Harvey, chief capital officer of TfL, with an update about the Docklands Light Railway.

“Testing of new DLR trains is progressing well and customers will start to be able to use these modern trains later this year.

• Ahead of this, some short-term timetable changes [are] needed on quieter routes to help maintain a reliable service
• First of 54 new trains will enter service later this year
• A full timetable will be restored once enough new trains are in service.”

Superb, Mr Harvey!