You City Slickers don’t know how easy you have it. Into the Tube, train, metro or even cycle to travel to work without ever having to talk to anyone.
Back home the same way and into the nice suburban house in a nice suburban street. Perhaps later a nice suburban curry, Italian, pizza after an evening in a nice suburban pub.
It is not like this in the country. Those villages nestling in the rolling Downs, fields or faraway hills are seething hotbeds of social privation and isolation according to a study just out.
Places where pretty twenty somethings can be shunned, sent to Coventry, because they are single. Where retired folk, who have done “rather well in the City” take over the running of the community /parish councils and village halls.
Before that truly endangered species, the local, can even suspect what is happening the lane bowling boards have gone. Badmington courts disappear and Black Umfolosi are strutting their stuff. Not that there’s any wrong in Black Umfolosi you understand. It's just when they visit twice a year for five years, you know it’s time the London lady at no 13 who does the bookings should be moved along a little.
The Daily Telegraph has the result of a survey of one such Home Counties village today
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/13/nrural113.xml
What it does not reveal is how such villages may cause conflict.
We live in one and have learned to keep our heads down rather than join the various cliché sub groups.
A brief note here. Over the years, with one thing and another, the village has divided in broadly two (of course there are many more) camps.
Those pro Joe and those anti Joe. Generally speaking I am anti.
This has to be a village classic. It happened yesterday
ring-ring-ring-ring-ring
"228"
"Agw, Joe" ...silence
"Agw, Joe" ...silence
"Agw......" ..."Yes, yes Joe. I heard you the first time.
"I'm just wracking my brain wondering what I could possibly have done to upset you...."
...silence
...silence
This is how World War Three will start.