The little yellow car

There has been quite a storm this past week, a storm caused by a little yellow car.  This car, a Vauxhall Corsa, has become almost as famous a little yellow car as the one driven by Noddy.  But perhaps I should start the story a little farther back, especially for our overseas readers.

One thing we are not short of here in England is picturesque villages.  You may well think that some of the hilltop villages of southern France or Tuscany provide lovely views, but I would suggest that for pure chocolate box prettiness only English villages will do.  You will find them right across the country, from the Isle of Wight to Northumberland, from Cornwall to Norfolk.  Some of them have featured in the television dramas of the Midsomer Murders series, much of which was, I believe, filmed in Buckinghamshire.  But it is the area known as the Cotswolds, a part of southern central England containing the rolling Cotswold Hills, that is particularly associated with chocolate box villages.  Among these is Bibury, which the nineteenth-century artist and craftsman William Morris called the most beautiful village in England.  Bibury is noted for the cottages made from honey-coloured stone under steeply-pitched roofs.  In particular, Arlington Row, a row of cottages that was built as a wool store in 1380 and converted into a row of cottages for weavers in the seventeenth century.

Picture by Saffron Blaze via Wikicommons

This delightful row is possibly the most photographed row of cottages in England and is visited by tourists from across the globe, anxious to take home with the perfect picture as a souvenir.

But photographers have complained about the little yellow car "photobombing" their pictures.  It seems that the resident of a cottage in Awkward Hill, leading off to the right in the picture above, has no garage and the only place he can park gets in the way of many of the photos.

Photo: SWNS

A lot of the photographers have complained about the car getting in the way, but my reaction is the same as many of the locals': tough.  Bibury is not Disneyland or one of those almost make-believe places like Jamestown, Virginia - it is a real, lied in place and those cottages are peoples' homes.  Besides, as the big picture demonstrates, it is quite possible to take a picture that doesn't feature that corner where the car is parked.