It was one of the first questions I was asked when I moved to the Cotswolds three decades ago: ‘Are you happily married – or do you live in Gloucestershire?’
The joke contained a surprising truth – as the rest of the country now knows. A new survey has revealed that people in the Cotswolds have more sex than anywhere else in Britain.
According to business consultancy Perspectus Global, couples in this part of the countryside have sex around 15 times a month – almost twice as much as Londoners.
Was I shocked? As a Cotswolds resident of 30 years, though no contributor 정품 비아그라 to the data, I can safely reply: not at all.
It was Jilly Cooper and her 1985 bestseller Riders that first put the ‘Couttswolds’ (after the posh private bank) on the map.
But Jilly was only doing what the best authors do: she was writing about what she knew. The Cotswolds earned its saucy reputation years ago – and I am only surprised it’s taken this long for it to be recognised as the sex-mad capital of the UK.
I learned this myself only too quickly not long after I moved here when I was invited to a dinner party in the late 90s.
After making small talk with the ageing gentleman sitting next to me, I was rather surprised when he leant across and whispered in my ear: ‘I have two Viagra in my pocket, fancy slipping outside for a quickie? They’ll think we’ve gone for a fag.’
Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black in the TV adaptation of Riders
I was speechless. I told myself that he was drunk and that it had been a one-off. But I was soon to discover that his behaviour was far from unusual in the area.
Judging from the gossip I quickly heard around the dinner tables, threesomes were almost de rigueur.
My daughters joined the local pony club, as you do, and I – who grew up on a council estate in Liverpool – became the unlikely owner of event ponies and a horse box, as well as the employer of several grooms.
I spent more weekends than I can recall on the horsey circuit – once being given a cheery ‘good morning’ from Princess Anne when her horse box pulled up alongside mine while I was eating a bacon roll.
Yet that surprising brush with royalty barely registers compared to the other things I saw as an out-of-my-depth, new pony club mother.
It was 1998 and the first time my daughter and I had travelled away to a pony club event. We were staying in a bed and breakfast with stables attached.
Before we went for dinner I mentioned to a groom that I might pop down afterwards to see how the ponies had settled in. At this point, I was told rather bluntly: ‘Well, if the horse box is rocking, don’t come knocking.’
Having spent the first 25 years of my life with my strict Irish Catholic relatives, it was certainly a culture shock. I gulped – but even worse was to come at my first hunt ball, 비아그라 퀵배송 itself a riot of barely repressed sexual energy.
The morning after the event, I asked a groom at my stables (who was Irish and very good-looking) if he had enjoyed his evening.
With a grin, he announced he had achieved a personal best: sex with four married women between 8pm and carriages at midnight. ‘They’re mad for it!’ he crowed with a twinkle in his eye. I could barely respond.
I asked him: Who were his conquests? He was no gentleman, I’m afraid, and supplied the names immediately. I knew one of the women – an officious pony club mother who wore pearls, twin sets and tweeds, and who was never quick to smile. I’d barely seen her out of wellies – although she was fond of carrying a whip.
Within a few weeks of arriving in the Cotswolds, I was questioning where I’d moved to.
Looking back, I think that may have been around the time my hair began to turn white as the urge to lock up my teenage daughters took hold.
It was Jilly Cooper and her 1985 bestseller Riders that first put the ‘Couttswolds’ (after the posh private bank) on the map, writes Nadine Dorries
I met a legendary, dazzlingly good-looking local huntsman. A flirtatious aristocrat, he had a predilection for mothers on the hunting field – as well as their daughters. Nothing has changed: indeed, it’s got worse.
New arrivals in these counties often report that you don’t have to wait long for a modern-day Rupert Campbell-Black (Jilly’s anti-hero in Rivals) wearing red corduroy trousers and a shooting jacket to slide up alongside you in his Range Rover.
However, frolicking in the hay is by no means confined to the upper classes.
Over the years I’ve seen people from a rich variety of backgrounds enjoying these same antics. Is it the rural air? Is a surfeit of game, sloe gin and red meat over-stimulating the senses? Are some locals just a little too at one with nature?
As one shooting friend said to me this weekend: ‘A poor shot will be the first to say he wants to get his leg over a better gun’s wife.
‘It’s all part of the banter – but, 비아그라 퀵배송 the fact is, he probably will.’
At a dinner party I recently attended, the conversation stopped dead as a well-known – and well-refreshed – guest thought he would entertain the table with a story about the ‘sex toy’ he had bought his wife for Christmas. Soup spoons froze mid-air, mouths agape as the beef consommé dribbled back to the safety of warm bowls.
And 정품 비아그라 I’ll be the first to admit that the recent arrival of celebrities to Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire is adding a whole new dimension.
They think no one knows what happens behind the electric gates of their mansions. But, with hangers-on from Soho and Notting Hill coming along, we can all guess what sort of parties some of them are really having.
And certainly, drugs are increasingly part of it. After-dinner chocolates laced with cannabis or magic mushrooms have become as much a social staple as port and stilton.
It’s much easier – if you’re rich enough – to be accepted here. If you move into more old-money counties such as Lancashire or Yorkshire, buying a big house and throwing lavish parties isn’t going to gain you entry to the county set.
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But the Cotswolds are near enough to London and awash with newly minted millions – so it’s easy to fit in. Celebrities and their guests are far more discreet than any groom ever was but they still need waiting on. The sheets need changing, the baths cleaning – and the stories escape and are halfway around Tetbury before the truth’s got its clothes back on.
And don’t think the middle classes miss out either.
The Gloucestershire village of Birdlip is notorious as a ‘dogging’ hotspot, while some farmers in Chipping Norton have reportedly had to increase security on their land to stop swingers gathering there for orgies.
Even in my own village, not far from Stow-on-the-Wold, there is a local bachelor who is legendary for ‘taking care’ of unhappy wives.
If a marriage looks as though it may be on the rocks, he’s the first to step in and offer a shoulder to cry on – and a lot more besides – offering the sage advice that it’s never wise to divorce where wealth is involved.
After all, no one wants to break up the estate. Far more sensible to stay married and conduct affairs while ensuring the children’s inheritance remains intact.
As one local dignitary aptly put it this morning when I called him: ‘There’s the power f***er, the celebrity f***er, the sporting f***er, the toff f***er, the money f***er and the plain old f***er. In the Cotswolds, 정품 비아그라 the world is your f***ing oyster!’
My own take on this frisky hotbed is that there simply isn’t anything else to do. In cities, there is no end of entertainment for adults and children alike. Here, there is almost nothing to amuse and a wet, cold Sunday can be very long indeed without even a local cinema to visit.
It’s what eventually drives many back to the buzz of city life and clears the big houses for the next influx to come along – and saddle up.
