Well, not quite.  Moving house implies another house to go to, or other grown up accessories, the kinds of things my elderly father calls “plans”.  (As in, “But what are your plans?”)

Although I have no plans, I have, nevertheless, suddenly acquired tenants and apparently they are not expecting me to be lurking in the back bedroom when they move in next month.  It seems they are also expecting my chattels to be gone.  Cupboards that haven’t been opened since 1984 need to be emptied.

Hands up who knows what a Teasmade is.

Today the UK government issued guidance that British schools should no longer teach children the spelling rule, “i before e except after c”.  It was one of the main news headlines all morning.

Haven’t they got anything better to think about, like crashing economies worldwide, wars in Iraq and Afganistan, unrest in Iran, terrorism in Pakistan, nukes in North Korea and disease and starvation in Zimbabwe (to name a few, if they are feeling bored and out on a limb)?

Apparently not.  They have other things on their mind.  The guidance says:

The i before e rule is not worth teaching. It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear ee sound. Unless this is known, words such as sufficient and veil look like exceptions. There are so few words where the ei spelling for the ee sounds follows the letter c that it is easier to learn the specific words.

According to the BBC, the directive, issued to 13,000 primary schools recommends:

other ways to teach pupils spelling, like studying television listings for compound words, changing the tense of a poem to practise irregular verbs and learning about homophones through jokes such as ‘How many socks in a pair? None — because you eat a pear’

Never mind the suggestion that our kids should learn spelling from television listings, could someone please explain the homophone joke?

I spent this morning catching up on housework and this afternoon working in the garden.  I have a viewing on Friday — for rent, not sale, but even these are rare, so the house needs to look its best.

I was about to go to bed when I remembered that I haven’t spoken to a single person, in person (as it were), since lunch time yesterday.  That’s more usual than not, at least on weekends, but it still surprises me.

Yesterday I went to the gym with my mad Norwegian friend who ran the 2001 London Marathon with me.  After the gym we sat in her garden for a while, eating sweet English strawberries with a glass of chilled white wine, and then I headed home.

The weather was good and I worked in the garden Saturday afternoon.  In the evening I decided to have a barbeque for one, my first this year.  At around 9 I turned on the tele for the first time in a couple of weeks and turned it off at around 9.08. 

I put on my new reading glasses that were meant to make readable even the Joyce Carol Oates book I have been trying to finish for 11 months, and I finally decided it wasn’t the specs.  Instead I picked up another book I vaguely remembering starting and not finishing.  With my new glasses I got to the part about bashing kittens’ heads on the bathtub and I remembered why I had put it down before — it wasn’t that I could read too little, it was that I could read too much.

If only new glasses could make better books!

I can read awful books, but I do like them to be good.  When I finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road I turned back and began reading it all over again.  And then a third time.  It is the worst (and best) book I have read in years.

But as I had already read The Road three times and I didn’t have anything new and desirable, and most of the books I love are in storage (I’m told you are not supposed to have overflowing bookshelves when you sell your house) on Saturday night  instead I read a few blogs and played a few games of solitaire on my phone and fell asleep to the BBC World Service on the radio. 

Sometime between 1 and 2 am I woke up and turned the radio off.  At 5.45 I resisted the urge to turn it back on again.  Too early, I told myself, though at 7 I relented.  On Sunday morning we get whatever is the regular news, but from a religious perspective. and I admit to being fascinated.

I was tired this morning, and I mssied most of it, sleepy enough to hope for a new Iran revolution, and awake enough to know it was improbable.

At 7.45 they ask me for money (The Week’s Good Cause), at 8 there is normal news and then the BBC broadcasts a Christian service from somewhere in the UK.  The music is usually worth a listen, and if you are religious you can say Amen without getting out of bed.

At 8.45 there used to be Letter from America from Alistair Cooke.  That was a sacred fifteen minutes in my house, even when I had hungry babies.  Since Alistair Cooke died the BBC has floundered to fit that spot, but I think they have recently found a replacement in our best known nature broadcaster.  Last week’s essay was on the sloth.  If that doesn’t fit for Sunday morning, nothing will.  

After breakfast I set about cleaning, with the radio still my companion.  Denis Healey, Labour politician, just past his peak when I first came to the UK, was choosing the eight “discs” he would take to a desert island if he was cast away.  I listened to his faltering voice, intelligent as ever, and realised he was 97.

I pulled weeds and exchanged a few, brief emails with a friend in the US.  By then it was early afternoon.  I had not used my voice for more than twenty four hours.

Outside it was hot and my little bit of garden — such a little bit that no one will buy my house — is so private that I gardened in my underwear. 

Before five I put on my trousers and gathered all my garden detritus together to take to the tip (= dump).  I imagine the tip workers look at me as I arrive week after week and think, that woman must have acres!

Today the tip workers were sweeping up, and getting ready for closing.  Not one even raised his eyes to look at me as I unloaded my tarpaulin of rose cuttings, thistles and dandelions.

On the way back I stopped at the store and bought tomatoes and wine.  The little girl serving me and I did not exchange a single word though there was an inevitable long pause.  She is under 18 and therefore cannot sell me wine without someone over 18 watching her do it.

She beeped the tomatoes through and rang a bell.  The woman behind me in the queue looked annoyed.  After awhile a man appeared at the other end of the store.  Alcohol? he shouted.  The girl smiled and beeped the wine.  I paid.  I said thank you.

It was only later that I realised I squandered this singular opportunity for the day’s face to face social interaction.

Not long after I got back home my elder son phoned and we spoke for almost half an hour.  First and last conversation of the day.

Many people life as I live, of course.  But I always think of them as old!

I have lived well over half my life in the UK, but I only became a citizen in 2005, weeks before the last general election and too late to register.  Tonight was my first opportunity to cast a vote as a UK national.

It isn’t a proper election, really.  For most of the country it is merely a European election, something even most Europeans, don’t care about — Slovenia turned out less than 17% last time around.  Only for a very few of us was it also time to elect our local representatives.

Even so, my village was buzzing.  It took me nearly an hour to walk the quarter mile from my house to the polling station because I kept running into people and everyone was in the mood to chat.  Each one of us clutched our polling card, sent by the Royal Mail, second class post, and headed in bold capitals: Representation of the People Act.

There are no hanging chads in England.  We are given a piece of paper and sent to a makeshift booth (not so much as a curtain) where there is a nice fat pencil.  We are enjoined to use that pencil to put an X next to one and only one candidate or party.  Then we fold our ballot and put it in a good old fashioned ballot box.  The local election results will be counted out tonight, paper by paper.  The European votes will be sealed until Sunday; by then 375 million people in 27 countries will have been offered a ballot.

I missed altogether the chance to vote for the Monster Raving Loony Party, a regular election contender in the first couple of decades I spent in the UK, but since the death in 1999 of their leader, Screaming Lord Sutch, apparently it’s no longer an option.  Tonight they weren’t on either of my ballot papers though the party is still publishing a manifesto.  (I like the idea of arming school nurses with dart guns to administer vaccinations during playtime - recess to Americans - more fun for the nurses and less stressful for the children.)

Nor have we heard much recently from the Natural Law Party, but long ago, before I had a vote, I paid taxes to fund their election broadcasts about Yogic Flying.  (I’m not complaining: they were very entertaining – I am only sorry I can’t share my memories of them, it seems they were too long before youtube. )

Tonight there were, nevertheless, plenty of other parties on the long ballot paper I picked up at the polling station:

British National Party - Protecting British Jobs.  These people exclude non whites from membership, advocate zero immigration and no imported goods (crumbs! what would we eat, wear, watch, drive?).  Their official policy is to pay all non whites to emigrate to other countries.

Christian Party - “Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship”.   I never heard of these folks, and don’t know anything about their policies but I am wondering why the quotes.  Is it a rumour? 

Conservative Party.  No tag line, but we know who they are.

English Democrats - Putting England first. 

Jury Team - Democracy, Accountability, Transparency.  Another one I have never heard of.   Jury Team? 

Liberal Democrats.  They wear socks with their sandals, drink warm beer and grow beards all round (ladies and gents).  On the plus side their economic guy knows how to waltz and has a son who is an opera star. 

No2EU - Yes to Democracy.  Foreigners might have noticed that we are just a wee bit ambivalent about Europe.

Pro Democracy: Libertas EU.  Like I said.

Socialist Labour Party.  Back on familiar territory.

The Green Party.  Sandals without the socks.

The Peace Party - Nonviolence, Justice, Environment.  I’m guessing Mom and apple pie too, but I never heard of this party either.

The Roman Party - Ave!  I am beginning to think I made a mistake not supporting them.  They sound like fun.

United Kingdom First

United Kingdom Independence Party - We know about these folk.  They have several MEPs (Member of European Parliament).  Some of them are in jail.

In the end I voted for the party of the guy who married a woman from Kenya and sired an opera star.  I can’t help it.  I’ve heard the kid sing La ci darem la mano.  By their fruits shall ye know them.

More on our elections soon… There’s nothing like British politics.

Any wide awake person in the UK ought to be able to tell you that the theme of the last week or so has been ducks.

First we had an update on the long running crisis of MPs’ expense claims.  We learned that Sir Somebody or Other had claimed more than £1600 for a “floating duck house” on his pond. 
In his inevitable apologia and announcement that he would not be seeking re-election the MP noted sadly that the house “in fact was never liked by the ducks.”

The good Knight ought to have consulted the good scientists of Oxford University.  The results of a recent study to find out what kind of water ducks like best were released last week.

When offered ponds, troughs, and other opportunities (possibly including floating houses) ducks prefer to stand in a shower.

A typical headline screamed, “Boffins’ £300k study finds ducks like rain.”

Well, it was a week when taxpayers were feeling especially ripped off, what with all the MP shenanigans, and to some, I guess, this felt a bit like a last straw, since apparently we footed the bill for this too.  But I calculate that means each UK income tax payer spent less than 1.2 pence to be able to say with confidence, “Nice weather for ducks,” every time it rains – which it does quite a lot.  Sounds like good value to me.

However, the Professor of Poetry election, held once every five years, was the real news in Oxford in the last week.  The Professor of Poetry is a prestigious but largely ceremonial post, and its only formal duty is 3 lectures a year.  All current academics at the University, and every graduate, gets a vote, though they must do it in person.  Recently the requirement to wear a gown while casting your vote was relaxed, but you can still see academics strolling down Oxford’s High Street towards Examination Schools (where the election is held) with gowns flapping behind them. 

As in another recent election the first woman candidate (Ruth Padel, Charles Darwin’s great great  granddaughter) was up against the first black candidate (Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott).

Ruth Padel had become a sudden celebrity in the 200th anniversary of her famous grandfather’s birth and was the media’s current darling, but frankly she didn’t have a prayer against the much more distinguished candidate.  Walcott was the heavy favourite.

Then a story began to circulate on the internet about how Derek Walcott had been accused of sexual harassment at Harvard in the early 1980s.  Next anonymous letters were sent (only to women academics at Oxford) detailing the allegations. 

Ruth Padel declared herself shocked by such low tactics and assured the press that she had nothing to do with such dirty tricks – she was, in fact, “devasted” by what had happened to another poet, and felt “tainted” herself. 

Derek Walcott withdrew from the race, and Ruth Padel was elected.

Over the next week it gradually emerged that despite her denials, Ms Padel had been very actively reminding the world, via a series of emails to her journalist friends, of Mr Walcott’s alleged murky past.

The trail of damning evidence began when someone noticed that the very first journalist who wrote about the sexual allegations against Mr Walcott was a man called James Walsh, Ms Padel’s former lover.  A poem was produced in evidence.

“Home Cooking” in which the poet and her lover have sex on the kitchen table, was said to be about the journalist.  I can’t find a copy, but I’m guessing it’s a rhyming poem.  They cooked a duck.

On Monday, a little over a week after the first woman Professor of Poetry was elected, her resignation was announced.

I’ve been away, dealing with a spot of bother.

Last Thursday evening, one of my neighbours knocked on the door and handed me two parcels she had signed for.  I thanked her and took them in, though I was a little surprised, because I wasn’t expecting anything.

I opened the first parcel.  It was an iPhone.

I’m not, on the whole, a covetous person.  Mostly I don’t have jewellery or antiques; my car is 12 years old and I have never bought an item of clothing that cost more than £150.  But I really love gadgets, especially electronics, especially phones, especially phones with internet.  Anyone who knows me knows I covet an iPhone.

I opened the second parcel.  It was another iPhone.

I didn’t break the seal on either box for a long time, but finally I thought it might be okay to open just one of the phones.  I plugged it into my computer.  In seconds I had a text message inviting me to log in with a user name and password that was a combination of my name and my birthday.  Clearly the phone was ordered by someone who knew me well.

The next morning I began trying to find out who had sent me this gift – partly so I could let them know that the order had been accidentally doubled up and I had received two phones.  I narrowed the suspects to one: my ex-husband.  We were pretty hostile for a while but have become friends again, and he was always a generous man.  He knows I want an iPhone and besides his denial was flippant “not me, guv, maybe they fell off the back of a lorry”.

Meanwhile, lest you think I am silly, I called both banks where I have an account, and each was certain that I was not paying for any iPhone or any iPhone bills. There was also nothing on my credit cards.

By the next morning my Ex had made it clear it really wasn’t him 

I dug a little deeper and accidentally got information on the account details, protected by a PIN I didn’t have. 

I had been the victim of identity fraud.

The account name was mine.  The account number was someone else’s (unknown).  The bills for the two accounts came to more than £100 a month.  It was likely he would notice.

And when he did, he was going to be pretty upset.  My name and address would be all anyone had.

I still didn’t get how the baddies benefitted - phones had been sent to me - but I was pretty sure I needed to get rid of them. 

I tried to take the phones back to the shop, but they absolutely refused to have them and finally I took them to the post office.  UK law says that mobile phone providers have to accept returns within two weeks.  This was within two days. 

I read carefully the return instructions, which said I must affix the label to the parcel.  The label was simply a large number 2 and a barcode.

The number 2 was reassuring.  That usually means Second Class Postage paid.  The barcode was less promising.  And there was no address.

At my local country post office, which is just a counter inside a news and stationer’s shop, I brandished my parcels. I am a little confused, I said.  Is the barcode the address?

The postmistress examined them and replied with enigma worthy of any oracle, Well, some say it is, and some say it isn’t.

I asked if she would nevertheless accept the parcels and she looked doubtful.

I began to get very agitated and explain that the shop wouldn’t take them either, but they weren’t mine and they had been wrongfully sent to me and I really, really needed to get rid of them.

The other customers in the queue began to get interested.

Unsolicited mail! shouted one, Not your problem!  Chuck it or keep it!  Up to you!

I said, My name is on the account, even though it’s not my account. I don’t want to be in trouble. 

The other customers sucked their teeth, meaning this was a problem. Who knew what to do about it?  It was bound to be trouble.  I hadn’t heard the last. 

The postmistresses conferred. The big number 2 on the label was very reaassuring.  At last they agreed they would take the parcels.

I said, pushing my luck. Please could I have a certificate of posting?

Emphatic refusals.  We don’t know where it’s going, see?  explained the postmistress, reasonably enough.

Eventually, with tears on my side and heckling in the other queue, they took the packages.  They gave me a receipt that simply noted down the barcode. 

I was surprised at how light I felt when the phones were gone.

The next evening (yesterday) I arrived home to find that another neighbour had signed for a new parcel.  He handed me a Sony laptop and my heart sank.

This morning I finally understood the scam.  It’s all about credit.

I called the people who had sent the Sony.  Amazingly, they sent it without any money at all.  I have (or used to have) a good credit rating and they trusted that I would pay later.

The fraud investigation team explained to me the system.  All someone needs is your name, address and date of birth.  They don’t need to know any credit card numbers or bank details

They apply for credit and order goods.  To protect you the goods are sent only to you.  That’s the bit I didn’t understand.  I didn’t think anyone would be so bold or open. Apparently the baddies hang around the house and just sign for your goods and have them, or, more often, they wait until the next day.  They knock on your door and say, Did you by any chance get a laptop computer delivered to you yesterday that you didn’t order?

You agree that you did.

Oh, thank goodness for that! They say.  I have been trying to trace where it went!  That order was meant for me! 

And then you hand over the goods, because you are glad to have the mystery solved.

Sounds improbable, right?  When I called the laptop people to report it all, they said, Fine, thanks very much, but what about the laptop delivered last week?

I guess the baddies got that one.  I never even knew it was delivered.  Maybe a neighbour signed for it, maybe the baddies, lurking in my driveway after I had gone to work, signed for it themselves.

Either way it is creepy.

In Britain we have a delightful annual tradition called the Budget.  Once a year the Chancellor of the Exchequer comes out of No. 11 Downing Street waving a battered red briefcase, called the Budget Box, and everyone takes his picture. 

Here is the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the Budget Box.  Inside the box is The Budget.

This Chancellor is called Alistair Darling.  That is his real name.  The Budget Box he is holding belonged to William Gladstone in 1860 and that is the real box, though Gordon Brown, who used to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but is now Prime Minister, had a shiny new red box made by Scottish apprentices which he used instead.  In these tough times Alistair (Darling) obviously felt we needed the comforting genuine and grown up Gladstone stuff.

The Chancellor’s emergence from No. 11, like a butterfly from the chyrsallis,  used to follow 6 weeks of what was officially called Budget Purdah, when there was a total blackout on financial news.  Now we have instead several months of unattributed briefings from “sources close to the Chancellor”.  Besides, Budget Purdah is probably politically incorrect.

Nevertheless, and though the plans are widely leaked, there is still some frisson of anticipation when the Chancellor stands up in parliament.  Everyone in my office peeked at the BBC website at some point this afternoon, though we all knew that when the Chancellor sat down, the price of beer, fags and petrol would have gone up. 

Budget Day is the moment when the Chancellor announces what the tax rate for the next year will be, how much money each week people on state pensions will get, how much the government will tax retirement plans, savings accounts, capital gains, inheritance, whatever.  And just, by the way, he can throw in anything he likes.  He always likes to make it more expensive to smoke, drink and drive.  Sometimes he likes to make it more expensive to read or eat or buy clothes too.  He can make it a good plan or a bad plan for me to retire or get married or buy a house or a car or a solar panel or a pint of beer or a porfolio of shares.  He can make anything he likes more or less expensive, because he can tax or untax anything I might buy or see or plan or do.

One year the Chancellor made takeaway food whose temperature is raised above the ambient air temperature 17.5% more expensive.  At a stroke milkshakes to go became more tax advantageous than coffee to go

What larks!

When he has delivered his budget the Chancellor says, I commend this Budget to the House.  And at last he sits down.  There are a couple of hours of debate.  All political parties get five minutes airtime to explain their position to the people and then there is a division (=vote) in Parliament and the Budget is passed.  I haven’t the energy to explain Parliamentary democracy here, so you will just have to take my word for it or look it up yourself.  The Budget always passes, because if it didn’t the Government would fall.

Meanwhile, while Alistair Darling has been thinking hard about the economy, the Prime Minister has had his mind on Pariliamentary pay and allowances.  The issue is a little tedious, but Gordon Brown’s response, announced in an unexpected video on the Downing Street website has got everyone wondering about the PM’s strangely inappropriate, sudden and intermitent grins, grimaces and eyebrow gymnastics as he explained the new rules.

Well, I don’t know about you, but  I  am glad to have a President who tells the truth about what we have done, says it isn’t going to happen any more, but draws a line under it by saying the guys on the ground aren’t going to be prosecuted.

Meanwhile, in case you missed it, I once wrote about going to the CIA by accident.  It’s still one of my favourite stories.

When I am on the canal I usually sit in what’s traditionally called the saloon, almost at the front of the 62 foot long boat.  There are two chairs, and I occupy both, moving from one to the other depending on the fierceness of the fire and the strength of the cold outside.  From one chair my toes can reach the cast iron stove, where there’s a mark matching the melted tread of my slipper.

On Saturday evenings I burn candles, stew a chicken and watch a bit of tele.  When I was at school, impossible as it sounds now, the clever girls did Latin and the dim ones did physics.  The tele is dim and prefers volts and amps to ablatives and gerunds, but because I am clever I don’t know how to give it what it wants.  It splutters in and out of life. 

I watch a show in which people have brought ugly stuff from their attics to a place where antique experts will tell them what it is worth.  It’s the credit crunch and that’s the only kind of tele the BBC can afford.  At exactly the moment when the expert says, You will be surprised to learn that on the open market this item would fetch…  my tele demands more amps (or volts; I don’t know which because I am clever) and it turns off.

I’d had enough of this last Saturday so I grabbed my torch (that’s a flashlight to you North Americans) and trundled up the towpath to the pub.  I knew Stematos, the Greek landlord, and his apple-cheeked British wife would be glad of my custom.  That is, I knew Stematos would be glad.   Apple-cheeked is not at all clear that I am worth the bother. 

As I have written before, I have more than once fallen foul of the 3 o’clock Baguette Watershed, meaning no foreign muck after that hour, but she might just stretch to a slice of ham between two nicely buttered slabs of honest British bread, if I ask especially apologetically. 

The pub is about a quarter of a mile along the towpath and over the bridge, but I didn’t make it that far. As I reached the bridge I saw that a group of boaters had gathered around a bonfire.  I took a spare seat and someone passed me a glass of wine.  Faintly acrid smoke, smelling of burning creosote, drifted past me and across the canal.  At my back I could feel the night, cold and clear, but the bright heat of the flames drew us all in, and we were warm and merry.

I had seen in the new year around a bonfire with much the same crowd: people whose last names I don’t know, who are called after their boats or creatures of the canal.  The bonfire shone on shaved-headed Ratty, my first friend along the towpath; purple-haired, Emma, my near neighbour; Pat the engineer; Mar who put an axe through his foot last week chopping wood and Scotty who has to go to parenting classes on Tuesdays or else he won’t be allowed to visit his wee babby. 

Because I used to walk a toy poople along the towpath, I have also had occasion to mention the scary dogs some of my neighbours keep.  My poodle has emigrated, and the uneasy peace along the tow path, and in the pub, is breached a little less often.  We are all still variously lame, divorced, pierced, tattooed, out to lunch or gone fishiing, TV license fee evaders every one.  I am fast catching up with the others, a connoisseur of scrounged bonfires: I favour picnic tables.

Nevertheless, it still feels a little odd to find my fifty-five year old self alone in this company on a March evening in England getting drunk under Bridge 216a and warming my toes on burning fence posts.  When I was a kid there was a joke (I think it was from Maine) and the punch line was always, You can’t get there from here. 

Turns out you can.

For twenty five years I have lived in a rural English village about twelve miles southwest of the Oxford city limits, and on the edge of the Cotswolds.  Almost all the houses are built of the characteristic yellow stone from nearby rolling hills.  Some are finished with thatch, and most of the rest, like mine, have fine, old slate roofs.

Until recently virtually every cottage in the village was owned, as they had been since medieval times, by the lord of the manor.  (These days not a lord, and indeed not even a knight of the realm – but the Squire none the less.)

Falling on hard(ish) times, in 1968 the Squire began to sell off some of the cottages, and for the first time people other than those serving either his estate or the local community moved in. 

My house, Hedges, was once part of the commercial centre of the village.  Hedges was a draper’s shop (run by Mr and Mrs Hedges – hence the name – don’t go looking for tall bushes if you come to visit).  Next door on one side, now given over mainly to cats, was the brewery.  On the other side were the general stores; behind, the bakery, and across the road, the malt house and (somewhat incongruously) a Baptist Chapel, a temporary early 20th century enthusiasm.

The last time I asked there were about 500 adults on the Parish Rolls, and I don’t suppose the number has changed much.  In the quarter of a century I have lived here a lovely old mulberry tree, the malt house, and a bizarrely out of place petrol station have all been knocked down to make way for modest development.  The estate’s stables were converted to courtyard dwellings, and I suppose a dozen or so more new houses have been erected.

The shop and post office, once my next door neighbours, have shut.  The Baptist Chapel is long gone, and a couple of years ago the Catholic Church closed down too, its site deconsecrated, but, in the property collapse, still empty. The 13th century Church of England remains, and the pub struggles on; Australian waiters serve yuppie food to visitors while the locals bugger off to the Trout, an old pub down the hill by the Thames, on the river’s last few navigable miles before it peters out at Lechlade.

Buckland still has a village school; 35 children were enrolled when Silverbridge walked the 50 yards or so from our front door to its, but I think there are more than double that number now.  Almost all come from outside the village and create mini traffic jams outside my house twice daily.

Not long after I moved to the village, the Squire, the one who had inherited the village from his grandmother, and who had seen the first sales of village houses, died.  His elder son, a man about my age, succeeded.  The estate still owned a great deal of property in the village, and all the surrounding land. 

The new Squire, a late 20th century gentleman farmer, shouldered the responsibility manfully, honed his enterprise, reluctantly sacked his father’s servants, went partly organic (grumbling publicly about what that had cost him), planted hedgerows, shot pheasant in season, spoke with finely clipped vowels, and knelt and prayed in church with his wife and two little girls exactly as often as it was seemly so to do.  

Last week he loaded his retrievers into his Land Rover, drove to the now mature woods his father planted for grouse cover half a century ago, and shot himself.  Used to gunshot, the dogs waited patiently for their master’s return until the gamekeeper found them, and the dead Squire, some hours later.

This Saturday morning I heard the sound of sirens, and seeing smoke billowing above the houses across the street, I followed the trail around the corner to what was once my babysitter’s home, now a weekend cottage for Londoners.  An early sixteenth century pair of tied houses for labourers and their families, it was one of the oldest surviving dwellings (originally two cottages) in the village. 

This is what I saw:

Through the afternoon most of the village came out to see the slow, smokey and undramatic conflagration.  At one point there were 15 fire vehicles lining the road, the firefighters moving with unhurried determination. They emptied the two swimming pools in the village and reduced our mains water supply to a trickle. 

Four hours later the frame that had lasted almost 500 years still stood, shrouded in smoke;

This morning, almost 48 hours after the fire broke out, two engines were still in the village, but by tonight they were finally gone, and I took this sad picture:

At the height of the blaze I ran into the woman who sold me Hedges twenty five years ago.  We chatted a bit, she wondering that I couldn’t sell that lovely house.  Her theory was (because it couldn’t possibly be the lovely house) that too many people were now parking on the village streets.  It wasn’t like that in her day. 

I hadn’t seen her in a while, though she is sometimes in the village because she still has family here.  I remembered, right after I asked her what brought her back this time, that her mother had been nanny to the young Squire.

I came for Charlie’s funeral, she said.

The funeral is tomorrow.  It has not been a good week in this every day story of country folk.