Magazines were such a massive part of my life growing up. My first ever magazine subscription was to Children’s Digest. Children’s Playmate soon followed in the logical progression.
To a certain extent, the 1980s and even the 1990s were a particularly heady time for the magazine industry.
The photographs have not done justice to the cottage.
Sarah recalls the website thumbnails: that vibrant red door; those shells, set between the bricks framing the windows; hanging baskets that are an eruption of life and colour… Gorgeous. She’d sent jubilant screenshots to her mother from the train. Yet photographs can’t capture the true allure of this place – the remoteness, the quiet. The trains had taken her only to the nearest village. For the last two miles, Sarah’s taxi was the only vehicle winding down narrow country roads.
“When I was twelve I got lost in the woods.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“What?”
“That’s like the opening line to a book. Or a film monologue. First scene, no music. It starts with a black screen and as you tell the story, it opens to a meadow like this.”
“But no music.”
“Fucking exactly. Nothing but the voice.”