The Kinks, the Cotswolds and the Next World Trade Center

 

This is Bourton-on-the-Water, a tiny idyll in the English Cotswolds. It's my friend Michael's favorite spot in the
whole world.

To understand why, it helps to know that Michael is a latter-day, non-Tory — i.e., altogether more complex and interesting — incarnation of the Englishman most of us non-Brits have in mind when we hear that Gilbert and Sullivan song: a tweeds-and-cravat-wearing gentleman scholar who — although he wasn’t born until 1960 — still can't completely forgive the Germans; still can work himself into a righteous tether over the decline and fall of old English carmakers like Rover, Morris, MG and Triumph; and is never happier than when he's ambling around a place very much like the Leicestershire market town he grew up in.

Which is to say, a place very much like Bourton-on-the-Water.

Michael introduced Bourton to me sometime in the late 1980s, when we were students together at St. Andrews University in Scotland. That was around the time he also introduced me to The Kinks by playing me their classic 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.

It turns out that the early prophets of the British Invasion and the quintessential hamlet of the English Midlands hold some of the most important lessons for ground zero, which I'll come to shortly. The convergence couldn't have been more fitting, even then.