Countryside

Forever Autumn

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

September

Gone are the aromas of hot earth and barbecues, lollipop-coloured clothes, other people’s lives audible through open doors and windows, sunshine warming bare legs, iced drinks sweet and herby.

As Summer tips into Autumn, there’s the scent of apples; hedgerows bejewelled with garnet and obsidian and ruby berries; the skip-whine-trudge of children going to school; bare legs encased; steaming drinks warming and spiced.

Conkers peek through spiky eyelashes from tree and pavement. What were you supposed to do to harden them? Oven? Vinegar? I can’t recall. Did I ever beat anyone? I can’t recall that either.

But I remember the first day of the school year when I was fifteen, far too sophisticated for conkers, walking down the hill to collect my friend, ignoring my mother’s plea to wear a coat. It’s still too warm, Mum, and it’s not going to rain.

I was ready for Autumn. I always was. Tired of the heat – or more often – the disappointment because there was none, tired of a lack of pattern, I was happy when primary colours became muted and freedom became something earned at the end of the day. Albeit briefly, I even looked forward to school.

We walk the mile to school wearing our freshly ironed shirts, knotted ties, dark skirts and jumpers. The uniform is supposed to make us look the same but never can. Short, tall, curvy, uncurvy, maturing at different ages into different shapes, we are ourselves, pushing the rules about skirt lengths and shoe styles and make-up to make uniform individual.

We pass the path to the waterfall, cross over the bridge over the river which will run slow into the bigger one for a few weeks yet and under the narrow gauge railway.

On every deciduous tree around us, the leaves are still green but they whisper in the breeze to each other ‘When shall we change? What will be the tipping point?’

I barely notice, too busy wondering if this year’s set texts in English will be good and what stories I’ll be asked to write and thinking as I’ve thought before:

Surely this year at last, school will be fun, the teachers will be inspiring, the bullies will have lost interest, and the boy will finally see me properly and fall in love…

October

By October, leaves are red and gold and orange.

My wedding day was in October. All the days leading up to it had been grey and drizzly. Early in the morning of that day, I heard a pattering on the roof. No one had planned for rain.

My father, the tee-total, brings me a Bucks-Fizz, saying ‘Rain before seven, fine by eleven’ to help me stop worrying about what will happen if it doesn’t stop.

Then we’re caught up in a flurry. I’m too busy with hair and make-up and unfamiliar hooped petticoats to notice what is happening outside. When my mother and sister have gone ahead, Dad and I wait with nothing to say, because what can be said? I am doing something irrevocable – going from single to married, from daughter to wife. I’m aware of myself teetering on the edge of change, while my father is muttering the words he will shortly need to say.

Who giveth this woman?

Her mother and I do.

I hadn’t lived with my parents for ten years by then and I was never my father’s chattel anyway, and he never thought I was. But I was his beloved, stepping into a new stage of life.

Once he’d held my hand as I learned to walk, and later held the bicycle steady as I learned to ride and then… both times, he’d let go to see how I managed alone. Now, as I teetered, he was trusting once more that once he let go, I’d keep my balance.

And then the car arrives to take us to the church and Dad and I walk towards the entrance, late guests scurrying past.

Arm in arm for the last yards we pause and look up.

Above us in the churchyard, trees bow heads crowned with golden leaves, and above those leaves is a canopy of the deepest, clearest, most beautiful azure sky.

I am ready.

November

November is sometimes a drowning month when wind drives the last leaves from every tree to skitter angrily across grey skies before rain drums them into the mud.

Even if it doesn’t rain, the skies are dull, the night encroaching on day at either side, crushing it slowly hour by hour towards Solstice. Frosts start, snow may fall.

For a day or so, fireworks stud the grey night, rockets going up, up, up and balancing in the darkness before… Hoom! They fall in showers of impossible brightness. Bonfires scent our hair and clothes with woodsmoke. Our hands are warmed by hot dogs and steaming chocolate, before waving sparklers in defiance against the black night.

I remember a firework display when my children were very small. My baby daughter puts hands over her ears and buries her nose in my shoulder, sobbing. It’s too overwhelming for her. Not for my toddler son who tries to out-jump and out-shriek the fireworks then… losing both wellies in the mud, steps forward in his socks and…then falls flat. Just as well the noise blots out what my husband is saying as he picks that muddy figure up.

When the fireworks are over, November becomes dull again until Christmas fills the town with lights and gifts and sparkle.

In the countryside, a few brown leaves cling moistureless for a few more days, then fall to crunch under feet before turning into earth at the foot of their tree.

In three months, they’ve gone from green to … dead?

Maybe not exactly. Because they’ve fallen, mushrooms can grow. Under them animals seek food or store it. A hidden world is revealed by bare branches: the last of the berries, bark, fungus, hedgehogs, deer, rabbits, squirrels, and the curious, mischievous fox – russet, red, fawn, silver, orange.

Those Autumn leaves have transformed, every one holding a memory of eons of leaves that once emerged green then turned gold then faded so something else could grow and live. Another tree, a fungus, a creature.

Everything fades but nothing ever truly disappears. It changes. It feeds. It makes something new possible.

Everything is a matter of timing and balance.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Risk

~ Paula Harmon ~ 1 Comment

My first introduction to the horror which was Public Information Films was when I was aged between five and six.

One day, the police brought an Alsatian police dog to school. I was (and still am to some extent) scared of dogs, but this one was beautiful. The policemen seemed huge. They told us to be good and not to be afraid of the police. Then they said they’d show us what happened to criminals.

We went to the school fields and someone dressed in a stripy top and balaclava appeared from nowhere, snatched a bag and ran off. The policemen blew their whistles and shouted ‘Stop thief!’ to no avail. The beautiful Alsatian tensed and was released. It sped towards the ‘criminal’ who dodged and dived but was eventually brought down to the ground, his (well-padded) arm clasped in the jaws of the tail-wagging dog.

It was pretty impressive, though we weren’t sure whether we were being told that the police would protect us, or that crime would be a bad career choice.

Afterwards in the classroom we were shown a film about strangers. It featured a little girl accepting a lift with a strange man in a brown car and ending up locked in the cupboard under the stairs with his shadow getting closer. It was absolutely terrifying.

I hope that no child in that classroom had any idea what threat that little girl faced other than death, but we all sensed it was very bad. Then, as if we weren’t traumatised enough, the teacher said that when she’d been six, a friend and the friend’s brother disappeared and were eventually found buried in a sandpit.

I can honestly say that I’ve never felt the same about sandpits nor brown cars since.

If the point of this exercise was to make us wary of strangers, it certainly worked for me. A year or so later I got lost and walked for miles before eventually deciding I had to ask for help. As a perfectly nice man drove me home to hand over to my frantic mother, I was engulfed not only in fear but also in guilt. I had disobeyed the ‘not talking to strangers’ rule.

But as for other Public Information Films? Mmm.

Children’s television was awash with warnings about what lurked in the world to kill or maim us.

Perhaps this was because we were one of the last generations of children in the UK to roam fairly freely – often chucked out on a summer morning to play and not expected home till tea-time (with maybe a brief lunch in the middle). Well before the age of twelve, we went without parents to Saturday morning cinema, sweet and comic shopping, or to play in whatever our environment offered us.

Tufty the Squirrel warned us about road safety.  Charley the Cat warned us about other dangers. I was fond of Tufty, even if he had some very stupid friends. Charley sort of annoyed me, possibly because I was older by then and less inclined to want to be bossed about by a cartoon animal.

The animated ones were quite mild really except perhaps for one about playing in old fridges. I never saw a fridge that wasn’t in a kitchen doing its normal job, but after seeing that short film I was vaguely terrified that if I came across one which had been dumped I might suddenly be overwhelmed with temptation, climb inside and get suffocated.

Live action public information films were much scarier. In the same vein as the one about the little girl and the stranger with the brown car, The Spirit of the Water told you what awaited any unwary child who fell into a river or lake. Then there were the risks of playing frisbee near electricity pylons or mucking about on a railway which really were just plain common sense.

I’m not entirely sure any of those films would be made for children under twelve nowadays. They’re three minutes of horror.

Did they really make a difference to us? I’m not sure they did.

Despite playing in woodland, ‘caves’, a river and for a while an unsecured building site, and despite taking all sorts of very stupid risks (though not with the railway) my generation of children in my particular village survived. I’m sure that playing unsupervised helped us learn to assess risk in a way that can’t be learned any other way. Just because none of the children in my village were badly hurt (though one got close) doesn’t mean that others weren’t. Of course they were and we all knew it.

But deep down, that film I watched about the little girl has never gone away, and I think it has always been the fear of abduction which weighed heaviest with me as with many people.

For the record, that’s not because I think it’s more likely now than it was in the past. Any quick piece of research will reveal child abductions going back centuries.

So why does it remain a fear when the risk is much lower than injury from playing by a road or river?

Is that because injury from play or normal activities is a natural and acceptable risk, but abduction as an offence against nature: an abnormal, unpredictable evil event that should never happen?

I think it is.

Did I allow my children to play unsupervised like I did? Not really. Roads are busier and the local river runs faster. And I also know that some of the greatest risks they faced and still face are online. My daughter and a friend played in the brook of a nearby hamlet a few times but otherwise my children’s outside play without parents was via Cub and Scout Camps.

Do I regret that for them? I’m really torn between yes and no. What do you think?

Words Copyright (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. Not to be used without the author’s express permission. Image credit: ID 13589617 | Playing Rope Swing © Dan Otten | Dreamstime.com

Wandering in Ink

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

This month I’m taking part in Inktober again, and the prompts all relate to travelling. My brain is going off piste as usual, but even so, it’s brought back many forgotten memories, only one of which, so far, has got into a sketch.

Before they had children, my parents were keen hikers. They marched out of London carting whopping metal-framed rucksacks and wearing heavy boots into the wilds of North Wales, Scotland, Cumbria and Northern Ireland, camping in the middle of nowhere.

They told us tales of a friend’s beard frozen to the zip on their sleeping bag; Dad standing on a broken bottle as he bathed in a chilly river and having to limp several miles to get it stitched up; the joy of finding a town with public bathing facilities (as in bath-tubs and the facility being public not the bath-tubs) where they could finally wash luxuriously in hot water.

Once my sister and I were old enough to walk for any distance, we were bought walking boots and went hiking too. (Note the faded polaroid of me, Mum and sister looking glamorous in Scotland below.)

One summer, when there was very little money in the holiday fund, we spent a week hiking about the Gower coast ‘Jasper Hunting’. That is, looking for seams of jasper in the rocks. We found a lot of fossils, which was fascinating in itself and the fact that we never found any jasper didn’t matter at all.

As a child, Dad loved horse-riding. I’m not sure whose horse he rode, because he definitely didn’t have one of his own. As an adult, he was keen that my sister and I learned to ride. I was keen too, having the typical little girl fascination with horses (albeit that I wanted mine to be winged unicorns) but I only ever had a few lessons during which my lack of natural authority became apparent. I was very good at getting on and off in the approved manner. What happened in the interim was entirely up to the horse who knew exactly who was in control. It wasn’t me.

We went on a couple of pony treks as a family and once the pony I was riding lost interest in plodding after its companions quite quickly and let them disappear into the mountains while it munched grass and contemplated what it had done to deserve such a dull life.

No amount of rein-pulling, prodding and encouragement made the pony move until… a bunch of kids from the local pony club galloped past. My pony raised its head, clearly thought ‘That looks like fun!’ and galloped after them.

During the terrifying minutes before the pony realised it couldn’t keep up and decided to wheel about and join its trundling stablemates, I lost hold of the reins and lay forward gripping its mane for dear life with my hands and its flank with my knees. I have no idea how I didn’t fall off. My unrequited love for horses abated after that.

A few years later, Dad and Mum joined a group setting up a visitor centre on a Welsh mountain. We’d spend our Saturdays there, helping with displays but mostly going for long walks high above the South Welsh valleys. No one who met me later really believed this, as Dad remained plump despite all the exercise and latterly spent most of his spare time sitting down writing. But back then, that’s what he did and consequently what we did.

I was twelve by then and wouldn’t have dreamed of telling anyone at school that I spent my Saturdays in hiking boots and kagoule, clambering up mountainsides while they were going to town with friends to buy records and make-up.

When you’re that age of course, all parents are embarrassing but mine seemed worse than most. A sister who was nearly three and a half years younger wasn’t much better. So I did my best to pretend I wasn’t with them.

We’d walk up hummocky, heathery, gorsey slopes under cloudy skies and I’d fall behind, forming descriptions in my head of a lone girl pacing herself as she seeks shelter in an inhospitable landscape, uncertain how long it’ll take to find it, or indeed if she ever will, longing for the lush, fertile country she comes from, escaping across wild, desolate, bare slopes without any certainty as to whether she’ll survive.

Then of course, I’d be dragged back into reality by someone yelling at me to stop lagging behind, or shout that it was time for a picnic of cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea.

I’d pause before catching up and look about, as the real world replaced my imagined one.

Greenish, greyish, purplish slopes climbed above me. Below was the pine forest we’d descend through later, crushing scented needles underfoot until we reached the visitor centre. Below that were rows of grey roofed terraced houses in a mining town. Further below was the motorway, the oil refinery… then dunes and the sea.

I recall those walks as always taken under overcast skies, rain imminent, but there must have been sunny days too. Perhaps the remembered weather is a reflection of that adolescent mood.

Now I live in chalk and cheese country: chalky ridges surrounding lush meadows. To my shame, I’m more likely to be indoors writing rather than outdoors hiking. My walking boots are who knows where, doubtless inhabited by spiders.

But that lonely figure whose journey I used to imagine in those Welsh hills is still trekking. She became a character in a novel that I started but never finished and is under the spare bed waiting for me to chivvy her up.

Perhaps it’s time to climb those slopes again and help her reach the end of her journey.

(Though I’m determined she’ll have something more appealing than cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea awaiting when she arrives. I certainly will.)

Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used or reproduced without the author’s express permission.

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Mirror Selves

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

In the last few months, life has been busy, hence getting out of the habit of blogging.

I’ve been working on A Justified Death (Margaret Demeray 5), and with Liz on Death in a Dinner Jacket (Booker and Fitch book 6). Both are now available for pre-order. That’s on top of a day job which is pretty trying (apply your knowledge of British understatement here); adult child wrangling; elderly parent/in-law wrangling; sad news from friends; talks; current global affairs.

Perhaps because I’m smouldering a bit at the edges, my eyes were recently drawn to a list of suggestions to counteract burnout. One took me right back to being six years old and Trixie and Trina:

Escape through the mirror and swap places with your mirror self.

Perhaps a year or so before I was six, my father read me an unabridged version of Alice Through The Looking-Glass and I loved it. To a girl who hated trousers and climbed trees in skirts; who got into trouble for backchat; who talked to animals, Alice was a kindred spirit, a role model and an inspiration.

Do we need trousers to have adventures? No! We can do it in frilly dresses.

Here’s a talking rabbit asking us to follow him. Let’s go!

Here’s a looking-glass we can step through. Let’s do it!

If I could have followed Alice through that mirror, I would have.

Perhaps that’s why I met/invented Trixie and Trina.

I’d recently moved school and my friend-making skills were terrible, so to begin with I was lonely and the target of older boys who’d threaten me, chase me and call me names. I reported it, but the teachers gave the standard response of the time: ‘Just keep away from them’.

I tried. I found a place to hide away: a corner by a glass door which was slightly shadowed, so I could see my reflection. In the absence of any other friend, I named my mirror self Trixie and my physical self Trina (or maybe the other way round). I decided we were twins who’d been forcibly separated and were stuck on either side of the reflection, desperate to rejoin each other.

We’d chat about bullies and loneliness and how we could be reunited. At least I think we did. I can’t really remember more than the names and sitting there talking to my reflection.

Eventually the bullies found me – clearly proving them right about how weird I was – and yanked me up by my anorak hood, nearly strangling me. I like to think a teacher spotted it and they were punished but can’t recall that either. I just knew it wasn’t safe to hide out of sight any more.

I started to make friends… and then after a couple of years moved schools again, which is another story. For a while, illogically, I felt guilty that I’d never gone back to visit Trixie/Trina before I left, that I never said goodbye. I half wondered if she remained trapped. Or if I had. After all, who’s to say which of us was stuck behind a reflection?

At nine years old, in a different place entirely, I forgot her and became fascinated by looking for ways into other worlds through the countryside near my new home. This was probably partly inspired Alan Garner’s books, but I like to think was partly instinctive as my ancestry comes chiefly from (in alphabetical not percentage order) Eire, England, Scotland and Wales.

It isn’t a good idea to cross into the realms of the Sidhe/Elves/Seelie/Tylwyth Teg nor to let them cross into ours. That’s why there are festivals and traditions around solstices and equinoxes, and an eerie edge to dawn and dusk when the wall between worlds is thin and the danger to humans is highest. But I didn’t realise that then.

Well before I heard of quantum physics, I sensed another world was just out of reach and all I had to do was find a way in. Was this because there really are other universes running alongside ours and I somehow knew it instinctively, or because I wanted to escape my reality? I don’t know, but I looked in the woods and the river for another couple of years without thinking of looking in mirrors instead.

By thirteen, the main ‘other’ world I yearned for was adulthood where I’d be in control, and mirrors were only for despairing over what I looked like in. While waiting for magical adulthood, I created alternative universes in my head and wrote about them: time-slips, fairy courts, aliens, ghosts. Of course, adult life didn’t turn out quite as controllable as I’d expected and I wish I still had the face and figure I used to about, but what teenager realises they’ll ever feel like that?

Then last week, when I was looking for something cheerful to counteract global politics, and read about avoiding burn-out by swapping places with one’s mirror self, I suddenly remembered Trixie/Trina and wondered what would happen if I sought her out to exchange realities.

When the bullies hauled her away from her side of the glass what happened next? I wondered. Is her world better or worse? Has she changed or stayed the same?

I remembered her as a small thin six year old with blonde hair, scabby knees and an anxious, serious, worried expression.

Now presumably, she’d be middle-aged, plump, greying with a pragmatic smile and sense of her own ridiculousness.

But what if she was no longer be my exact reflection but a different person after all these years of separation?

What if she were no longer there at all?

I looked at the news again, then the list of suggestions, then back at the news. We live in a world where everything – not just me – seems to be burning out.

If I could climb onto a mantelpiece and enter a mirror and risk what was on the other side of the reflection, I thought, would I?

Would you?

(Actually, if you do it, can you pull me up? I’m not sure my knees could manage climbing onto a mantlepiece any more.)

Words copyright (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. All rights reserved. Not to be copied or used without express permission.

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Through_the_looking_glass_and_what_Alice_found_there_(1897)_(14779323804).jpg

Tales of a Country(ish) Mouse

~ Paula Harmon ~ 4 Comments

Although I was born in London, I’ve lived in small towns and villages since the age of eighteen months and consider myself a sort of country mouse. Of course, I’ll never be a ‘local’ since I don’t at least three generations of family in the graveyard.

I have no idea therefore what it’s like to live in a city. Would people really step over you while you expired on the pavement (which was my mother’s view when she married Dad and moved into inner London)? Do city dwellers ever notice anything their neighbours do? Most importantly, are there any handy wisewomen in an inner city ready to do the necessary?

At sixteen, when I lived in a village and went to school in a nearby town, I developed a wart on my knee and was very distressed, as it was obviously going to ruin my chances of ever getting a boyfriend.

I was distressed enough to consider consulting one of the girls at school, whose mother was rumoured to be a wisewoman. Allegedly she could remove warts by the time-honoured method of putting a steak on it, then burying the steak at midnight at full moon.

99% of me doubted that (a) this would work and (b) anyone would spend a small fortune on steak for supernatural purposes. It wasn’t a rich area, and I could imagine locals offering her a slice of Spam maybe, but steak was/is rather too expensive and delicious to waste on ‘a rounded excrescence’.

Anyway I had no money, and doubted my parents would give any some for vain magical purposes. Furthermore, the girl lived in another village entirely and the buses stopped running after 9.30 p.m., so how would I get myself, the wart and the steak to her for midnight?

Fortunately for me and my love life, one day I was late for the bus, tripped over the kerb in my hurry and fell flat on my face moments before it arrived. I limped aboard, waved my pass and sat down only to realise that the wart had been knocked off. It never grew back.

Ten years later I was living in a completely different place. This was a small town rather than a village, and the wisewomen were rumoured to hang out in specific parts of a forest a few miles away. However I do sometimes wonder.

One day I was driving to work and had a minor accident. (Minor for me – I only had a whiplash injury, not so minor for the car which was my sister’s and had to be written off – I think she still holds this against me.) I was five miles from home and ten miles from the wisewoman forest. Nevertheless, about a week later after the neck brace had come off, the milk lady (doorstep deliverer of pre-ordered milk and eggs) came round for that week’s money. Now bear in mind that the dairy was in a village in a different direction again.

‘Good evening,’ she said. ‘Heard you had an accident in [name of village] last week. You OK?’

Pre social media and mobiles for anyone but the rich, how did she know?

When we married, my husband came to live in that town with me. As a lifetime city dweller, he rather scathingly referred to it as a one-horse-chicken town or an S-bend with chip shops. I got fed up with this (it was an S-bend with chip shops, plus Indian and Chinese takeaways duh) and was highly amused when some family genealogy discovered that a quarter of his ancestors originated five miles from this one-horse-chicken-town (broadly in the direction of the wisewomen’s wood) and had been buried in that graveyard for about fifty generations before one of them had enough and moved to the ‘big’ city (Gloucester) and their descendants to bigger places.

After about eleven years, the opportunity came up to move to a different county entirely, and we looked on this as a sort of adventure. I initially found it very difficult adventure but that’s another story – let’s stick to the nice stuff which by far outweighed the hard stuff.

My husband rented on his own in a village for a few months till the end of the summer term when the children and I joined him. We lived there while we sold one house and bought another. Until we turned up, I don’t think my husband had really seen anyone in the village because he was working long hours several miles away and came back to us at weekends, but literally moments after I moved in with the children we had a series of visitors.

The first was a lady from the Women’s Institute armed with home-grown vegetables and jam, inviting me to join the group. The second was a retired vicar inviting us to church and the children to Sunday School. The third was someone with information about things on at the village hall. It was rather heart-warming, but there was a tiny bit of me that worried that we’d moved into an episode of ‘Midsummer Murders’ and wondered whether we were going to be victims or witnesses.

By the time we moved again, just before Christmas, into our (hopefully) forever home, it was teeming with rain, the house was freezing and our washing machine packed in. Although it was upsetting at the time, it was the kindness of virtual strangers – people I’d known for a total of three months – who chipped in to help with laundry, emergency child minding, endless coffee/tea/cake, plants, school lifts and most importantly friendship while we adapted.

Country life is also entertaining. Would the following happen in a city? You’ll have to tell me.

Several years ago, old, yellow, disintegrating bones appeared poking through the grass outside the parish church. They were reported to the police and a young PC turned up and spoke to the church secretary.

‘We’ll have to get a pathologist and the coroner and who knows what,’ he said. ‘I mean it could be a murder.’

‘Unlikely though possible,’ she said. ‘But you’re hardly going to catch the murderer now.’

‘How do you know? They’re human bones!’

‘Yes, but look behind you – it’s the church. Look round – it’s the church yard. Those sticking up stones with writing on date 1790 and 1801 are – oddly enough – gravestones. No one has been buried here for two hundred years and those bones are very very old. I’ve no idea how they’ve got to the surface but…’

‘Oh. Yeah. Well. It’s protocol innit.’

A couple of weekends ago, I met a friend for lunch in yet another country town. He’s recently moved away but this was the town he originated from and he was back visiting family.

He was running late because he was walking into town in the rain, and while waiting I was engaged in conversation by an elderly man at a nearby table who wanted to know where I was from and if I’d travelled by bus.

Being me, I started feeling guilty about the fact that I’d driven there, even though the bus service is generally terrible. Then the man listed all the main buildings and businesses he could think of in my town and asked if they still existed.

I informed him that a café was now an optician and an Italian restaurant was now a Gurkha restaurant and was totally blank about somewhere I’d never heard of. He seemed to view this as my fault. I think he was about to move on to how many of my ancestors were in my local graveyard – and be disgusted when I said none that I knew of – when thankfully my friend turned up.

Afterwards, I offered my friend a lift back to his family’s house (as it was still raining) and we walked back to the carpark via an upmarket supermarket because I needed to pick up a few things. He said ‘Do you know, I lived here most of my life, yet I never recognise anyone in the street.’

I said, ‘Do you know, I never come here without meeting at least one person who seems to be the result of three hundred years of inbreeding. Present company excepted.’

‘It’s not really that bad,’ he said with an unconvincing chuckle.

We then went to an upmarket supermarket and waited in the basket only queue. An oldish man came up to me and more or less shouted in my face ‘Where’s the tea?’

I said ‘Er… I don’t know but there’s the coffee [pointing] Maybe it’s there.’

‘OK,’ he said, then stabbed a finger at a small crate that was nearby waiting for staff to unload things onto shelves. It had a banana on top of it alongside a packet of biscuits. ‘See that banana?’

‘Er yes.’

‘That’s my banana. Don’t let anyone touch it. If anyone touches my banana I’m gonna, I’m gonna… no I can’t tell you what I’m gonna do. You’re a lady.’

‘Er OK.’

He wandered off and I said to my friend ‘I rest my case’ and then went to be served.

Now bearing in mind this is an upmarket supermarket, where one might expect superlative customer service, the woman behind the till, like the Tar Baby, she said nothing. She simply stared as if waiting me to mindread. I waved my loyalty card under the scanner and waited for her to say something to confirm it had worked.

She said nothing.

‘Has it scanned?’ I said.

She nodded slowly and deeply and then with the sigh of someone who’d been asked to ladle sand with a sieve, scanned my two items of shopping then waited for me to mindread again. No ‘That’ll be £2.78’. No ‘Card or cash?’

She said nothing.

So I waved my bank card, feeling somewhat unnerved. She pressed a few buttons and eventually the payment went through. Then with evident disgust at having to utter, she barked ‘Receipt?’

I said no, walked out, turned to my friend and said ‘I rest my case again.’

OK OK. So as far as I can establish, my Scottish ancestors lived in a tiny area for generations before one of them got fed up and moved to a big city (Glasgow) and met someone doing the same from a different tiny area. I am also still totally confused about my Kent ancestors, who probably also swilled round in the same area until it was absorbed by London. So what with that subconscious knowledge and what I’ve learned over years of living in small towns, I’ve long decided not to do anything dubious, as there’s a reasonable chance that everyone in a ten mile radius will know about it within ten seconds – possibly before I even realise I’ve done it.

So I think back to my mother talking about her loneliness, aged twenty-three, moving to North London when she was newly married, feeling as if she could die in the street and no one would care and I felt very grateful.

I know that if I collapsed in my town, not only would people care but everyone in a ten mile radius would know before the police did and post it on social media.

And for the record, just in case I develop a wart again, I know where a wisewoman is too! (Although she’s most likely to tell me to get a grip and have a glass of something nice and forget the wart, than ask me to waste a steak or spoil a midnight walk at full moon. Plus she’s vegetarian and I’m not sure it would work with tofu. Then again, I haven’t actually asked her…)

Copyright Words (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. Not to be used without the author’s express permission. Image: Illustration 185276076 © Galyna Novykova | Dreamstime.com