Ellen DeGeneres takes the art of the flip to the Cotswolds<\/a><\/p>\nI now wear the equivalent of a hazmat suit to the station for my commute to Paddington, and I don\u2019t take it off until I\u2019m past Reading. All the other commuters are the same. You see them on the platform, carefully protecting their box-fresh best and sporting that quietly nervous look, not quite out of danger yet, like angsty staff on the roof of the US embassy before the fall of Saigon. And the rest of the Cotswolds punters, on the opposite platform? Like Orcs from The Lord of the Rings. <\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the central irony to the myth of the glamorous celeb-filled Cotswolds. Everyone here looks rubbish. No one is smart. Everyone\u2019s filthy. Like an army of tramps. All the rest is duplicitous hype and nonsense. And all that David Beckham lifestyle porn? Where he sports the latest \u201cCottagecore\u201d outfit of pristine cardigan, clean cloth cap and spotless carpenter jeans, usually featured in a social media post that reads, say, \u201cThis is me, in the garden, checking on my tomatoes\u201d? Rest assured that five seconds after the picture is taken he\u2019s most likely gone full Swampy. The character reference here, in fact, is Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator, when he first faces the alien and realises that, simply by hanging in the jungle, he has accidentally covered himself, head to toe, in mud. <\/p>\n
And so my heart goes out to DeGeneres. I feel that she was sold a lie, or that she stared into the celebosphere and thought, \u201cCool. I\u2019ll go to the Cotswolds! It\u2019s full of fabulous people in big houses enjoying stylish soirees in fashionable outfits!\u201d And what did she get? Mud. <\/p>\n
KST is a cut above the rest<\/p>\n
Say it ain\u2019t so. Kristin Scott Thomas might be about to exit the smash TV spy drama Slow Horses. An industry insider has claimed that the 65-year-old appears \u201cmiserable\u201d these days, and not very \u201centhusiastic\u201d. And? I once interviewed the great Dame in the dressing room of a London theatre and she wasn\u2019t exactly bouncing off the walls with excitement. The room was tiny, she mostly went there, post-matinee, to sleep on a chaise longue and so, as I nestled at her feet, like an obedient corgi, she demanded the door be opened wide to the busy corridor behind me, presumably in case I crossed a journalistic line and needed my marching orders. Obviously, because I\u2019m a pro and a deeply lovely person, this never happened. In fact, midway through the chat, she got up, shut the door tight, and returned to the prone position. Besties forever. Point being, to someone else, say an industry gossip, Kristin Scott Thomas might\u2019ve appeared miserable that day. But to me she was just instinctively, intelligently, and refreshingly, serious.<\/p>\n
Dogless walkers \u2014 weirdos!<\/p>\n
Speaking of countryside absurdities\u2026 I empathise fully with Jennifer Saunders, who says that going for a walk without her beloved whippet, who died last year, is weird and \u201cutterly pointless.\u201d Over the years, I have become so well trained, or brainwashed, by my dogs that I simply do not understand people who choose to walk without one. I sometimes meet men, for instance, in the woods alone when I\u2019m out walking at dusk. I instantly think, \u201cSerial killer?\u201d, and move on. Or I see a woman approaching, again alone, and so I can\u2019t help but surmise, \u201cBreak up, right?\u201d Or two men together. \u201cOn the run?\u201d Or two women. \u201cFamily crisis?\u201d Or children. \u201cLost?\u201d I mean, what possible reason is there for walking without a dog?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stop the press, spoil the sourdough starter, and cancel the farmers\u2019 market. Because Ellen DeGeneres is (possibly) leaving…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[93,61,60,282],"class_list":{"0":"post-169058","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}