If you wanted to observe a celebrity in their natural habitat, it used to be that you had only to drive 90 minutes out of the capital.
On Friday evenings, Range Rovers would stretch the length of “the cut” - that section of the M40, which slices through the Chiltern Hills (and which, incidentally, you can see in the opening titles of The Vicar of Dibley) - as the great and good from the worlds of politics, fashion, art and media headed to their Cotswolds piles. Little wonder, it was known as the West London corridor.
If you lived in the Burford end of Chipping Norton, and counted Matthew Freud and Elizabeth Murdoch among your neighbours, you were in for a weekend of partying in a barn. If you were Kingham-bound, a couple of days cosying up by a pub fire, with the labradors, was in store. It was a corner of the country where the Camerons mingled with the Brooks; where Kate Moss would rub...