By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
A few of you have wanted to know where I’ve been the last couple of weeks. Well, my body has been at my house dealing with a bad cold that went rogue. (I’m better now, thank you.) The rest of me has been spending a lot of time in quaint English villages, where flowering vines cover most of the buildings, where there is almost always a festival going on, where old ladies in headscarves have a lot to say about whatever is going on. There are also quite a few murders, but usually the victims weren’t very likeable, and an eminently likeable past-middle-aged detective named Tom Barnaby and his young sergeant, currently named Ben, always find the culprits. I’ve come to know DCI Barnaby and his family quite well: his wife Joyce, a stay-at-home partner, a great homemaker, but not a very good cook, who works hard in all the worthwhile community events, and his daughter Culley, an aspiring actress, who recently married a rock musician. These folks have become my second family as I have been binge-watching till I’m half-way through the 20 seasons of Midsomer Murders on Netflix. (Actually I think the 20th season is on Amazon, not Netflix.)
I am not alone in my addiction to this show: Hugely popular since it first aired in 1997, despite a change in the main character in midstream the series is watched worldwide in more than 200 countries.
I love it. I can’t get enough of British countryside ways that have probably mostly vanished in real life. When I have run out of Midsomer episodes, I guess I’ll go to back and rewatch Father Brown, which has a similar small town flavor, set a few decades back.
But I started this carrying on about these British series as an excuse to tell you about my favorite episode of Midsomer Murders, titled Small Mercies, set around the fictional model village of Little Worthy, where that week’s first victim was found staked down Gulliver-style on the greens of the old-fashioned miniature village. I really don’t love the murders on this show, though they are pretty creative (another victim got killed by a giant wheel of cheese) but I put up with them for the wit, the great characters and the settings. I fell in love with the model village. I knew they couldn’t have created all that for this episode, so I Googled “Midsomer Murders model village.” I found plenty.
The actual model village is Bekonscot Model Village in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, which next year celebrates its 90th birthday. I’m going to steal a few lines from a recent article in The Guardian. “..visitors come for the sense of order and control the model village brings to a chaotic life” the schools are decent, the church is full, and the blaze that regularly engulfs a thatched roof in the middle of town is always dealt with swiftly by the fire brigade……and people walking around the shops didn’t appear to be addicted to their phones.”
Begun around 1920 by Roland Callingham, an accountant who filled his home with model railroads until his wife made him move them outside, it continued to grow to the point that friends encouraged him to invite the public, and in 1931 he did. It’s been growing ever since. It now is a has grown to feature several tiny villages, and I believe I read is the size of as football field. All plants, including tiny trees, are real.
Of course, they have an active Facebook page. I messaged them to say how much I loved the whole thing. I got a nice reply the next day from Cathy, who then sent me the link to the great Guardian article that I quoted from, which explained some of the reasons we love miniatures so much. And also opened my eyes to the wealth of miniature villages there are around the world.
I know some of you are bound to be as fascinated with miniatures as I am, so I am going to post a bunch of links and articles on my Facebook page, www.facebook.com/lorettaslivingwell about some of the other amazing places around the world. Especially the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, covering one floor of a huge warehouse, featuring almost ten miles of railroad, which passes through tiny landscapes of Germany, Italy, US, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. There are countless roads and an airport. An amazing assortment of buildings, including The Colluseum, St. Peter’s with a tiny pope, several Las Vegas hotels , and Mount Rushmore to name a few. In the villages not one, but numerous fire trucks rush to put out fires every 20 minutes.
I’m overwhelmed. These places are all over the world. One is in New York. I can’t tell you any more because I’m out of room. If you hate this kind of stuff, you’re glad for me to shut up about it. If you love it, you can find all you’ll ever want to know by Googling it. Or you can go to Loretta’s Living Well on Facebook, where I promise I will post a bunch of my favorite stuff about tiny villiages.