After a few weeks in London and a few big nights with my homie Kunal I was done with it. Whilst London has its own flavour of big city, its still big city; and deep down its the same as every other big city.

One thing I didn’t know about London is that the taxi ride from Heathrow -> London is like 90 minutes. The thing I felt least like doing in the whole world was a 90 minute cab ride to the airport followed by a ~3 hour clearance time in Heathrow followed by a 12 hour flight to South America. I decided instead to book an AirBnb for a 3 days near Heathrow at a little village called Datchet.

A few things to note here:

  • I didn’t really appreciate that the UK had “villages”. Coming from Australia you can have a town or a city. Anything smaller than, lets say, 10 thousand people doesn’t really exist except as a “retirement town”.
  • Anything smaller than a town that isn’t a holiday destination is just a suburb generally.

Week 1

The plan:

The place I booked was 10 minutes from Heathrow. I booked for 3 days, with the idea being that we’d get to our Airbnb, wash our clothes and sort out our luggage, and then head to Heathrow a bit later after we’d decided where we were going in South America.

Heres what actually happened:

As we drove into Datchet I realised I was in a village. I’d never been to a village before. The London greater area is an internal maze of narrow streets and Burroughs that have all kind of blended together into one giant, red-brown bricked nightmare of urban sprawl. Once you get out of the sprawl there are the standard highway/freeway type traffic arteries, but everything “within” the sprawl is narrow, 1000 year old streets not designed for modern traffic.

When we turned off the highway into Datchet I saw the quaint ‘Welcome to Datchet’ sign out the front of it and was taken back to country towns in Western Australia (where I grew up). As we drove through the “suburb” of Datchet it hit me: this was its own place. It was this little, geographically separated community of people. It was a fucking village, and it had all the cliche aspects:

  • a main street
  • a single pub
  • a single petrol station etc

The plan hadn’t changed - stay for a few days, sort our luggage out, book a flight out of the UK, but now we can add “do cliche village stuff to cover time whilst we complete said tasks”. And then this happened.

Of course, old mate COVID gave a …hearty “fuck you” and decided that I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d been feeling slightly COVIDish on the taxi ride to Datchet, but given I’d just got over it 2 weeks beforehand I was thinking there was no way I could could have this demon flu again. Well, 3rd times a charm and it wiped me out for 6 days (much better than the 6 weeks and 4 weeks respectively from the first and second rounds).

The reason this wipeout is important is because I can’t really describe how awesome our AirBnB in Datchet was. We were in an old manor-type house; easily 400+ years old in a cultivated acre of land. Here’s an awkwardly shot video of it:


You’ll notice a Range Rover and a Tesla charger in the hedges 😬. Here it is in better resolution.

The point I’m trying to make is that this was an incredibly beautiful property, and when you’re crippled with COVID for 3rd time in 5 months (I’m one of those people that COVID hits like a fucking sledge hammer) there are few better places to stay.

This amazing place also had DOGS. TWO GLORIOUS COCKER-SPANIELS:

note - these are thumbnails for a video gallery so they look a bit off; these will be properly reimplemented when I build a video playlist component for this blog

The neighbours also had a gorgeous brown labrador that would come over and play.

She would do a hilarious thing where in the morning where she’d run over to the back door and emit a solitary bark. She’d wait patiently and if you didn’t let her in she’d run to the front door and do the same thing. One soft notification bark to let you know she was ready for pets and she wasn’t leaving until she got them.

I could endlessly reminisce about these glorious hounds, but here is a gallery dump for your enjoyment. Just know that getting pounced on by dogs every morning whilst you’re in COVID misery is the greatest cure.

Week 2 - Week 6

After 6 days/7 nights I was ready to leave the house. We were lucky that we’d been able to keep extending our booking. I went for my first walk through the towns main street with the intent of going to an English pub; a lifelong and worthy goal of mine. It was perhaps 10 minutes by foot from the amazing AirBnb. It was during this walk that I walked past Francos and thus forms the origin story for Dom.

Those stories are better captured in those articles, but in Datchet I had the most amazing time. I met some absolutely epic people, including real life gypsies which was a trip. Dom and AJ became lifelong friends. I had lots of beers with the legends Jamie and Andrew. I saw photos and paintings over 100 years old in a 600 year old pub (!). The pub is next door to the church which is the greatest thing ever.

Closing Thoughts

I was in Datchet for 6 weeks. By the end of that time I knew everyone in the town, to the point where I was renting temporary accommodation off of locals and on the day of our leaving flight we were leaving our luggage at the local pub whilst we got haircuts.

The place is awesome and the mates I made are awesome; and I say this non-whimsically - its left an indelible mark on me that I wont soon forget.






Windsor Castle

Datchet is near Windsor Castle so I did the standard tourist stuff. This is the least interesting thing about Datchet.