On a late afternoon I am struck by a most picture perfect #home and country style living# scene. On velvety green grass surrounding a picturesque cottage, I walk up to my host, father of four and owner of four popular London based restaurants. He sits in front of a clay open air pizza oven, shuffling a large stainless steel shovel-like ‘peel’ in and out, sliding baked goods a bit further to and from the fire inside.

He and the pizza oven are set in a private orchard-garden surrounded by lavish green vales and hills. We are talking Dorset, next to rich and beautiful Somerset. At a two hours driving distance from London, sheltered today by blue skies that are finely larded with breezy white strokes.

William Wordsworths’ poem:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils…
could have been written exactly here instead of in the Lake District.

A couple of Adirondack or Canadian chairs, typical for Maine, prop perfectly the simple out and about life style. The wooden, elegant yet rustic garden furniture originally from Westport USA was acquired after their last oversees holidays. This morning under a fresh summers’ downpour it was put together by hand. During the same time my friend, fierce- and beautiful mother of the earlier mentioned four, prepared pizza dough, adding some rye flour to consolidate it.

The picture perfect home and country style living scene also depicts seven kids, sitting about the green orchard, devouring their self topped pizzas. Featuring a backdrop like as if turning the next page of that very sensuous magazine: slowly changing colors into orange and purplish.

Hence the kids start to play games involving throwing apples at each other and tossing an egg. Laughing and enthusiastic screams make us turn our heads away from our light-hearted conversation facing the glowing fire in the stone oven. Now turned into dedicated supporters we sit by the kids’ nameless and priceless games. Until around the same time we all decide the game is over. As harmonious as only fiction has it, the seven kids at once run inside to go and watch a movie while we assemble a stack of empty round wooden cutting boards, an empty wine bottle and left over Pellegrino.

While we’re leaving the perfect magazine scene, the sky over the cattle fields and lush green bushes sets on fire. So it seems. The beauty of it not to be pictured nor described. But to imagine!