Are villages more poisonous places than towns? Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, thought the country more wicked than the city, and so does Anthony Horowitz, the screenwriter who has taken over the popular series Midsomer Murders (featuring a fictional Oxfordshire village with a higher homicide rate than the Bronx).
“English villages are special places where hatred and mistrust and suspicion and anger and bitterness have a natural place to grow,” opines Mr Horowitz, who also wrote the compelling Foyle’s War.
He echoes Agatha Christie’s view that villages are toxic because everyone has something to hide – and villagers often know each other’s hidden vices. And many years ago, an Irish author, Brinsley MacNamara, wrote a book with the telling title The Valley of the Squinting Windows. The valley in question was full of noxious busybodies spying on one another.
But surely this is overstated: in villages and small towns, people can also be kind and caring. You don’t often hear of some lonely person lying dead undiscovered for months, maybe years, in a village or small town. A certain “nosiness” also means looking out for neighbours.
One of the interesting aspects of small-town life is that inhabitants observe one another age gradually, and take into consideration the small changes that come with age. The churches are also a focal point of smaller communities and can provide a network of fellowship.
Maeve Binchy once explained to me why villages and small towns make for a great setting for writers. Interlocking relationships can be better explained, she said, and coincidences seem more plausible when a villager walks down the High Street than when she joins the throng at Piccadilly Circus.
Small communities serve writers well: we shouldn’t exaggerate their malice.
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Shami Chakrabarti, the Labour Party’s shadow attorney general, has met with some controversy over the issue of her son’s education. Baroness Chakrabarti is opposed to grammar schools; but her own son attends the rather posh Dulwich College, a private school (and alma mater of PG Wodehouse), which seems somewhat elitist. She has thus been accused of hypocrisy.
She might well be comforted by Christian moral theology, which holds that a person may affirm a virtue even when they are unable to practise it. A divorced person may hold faithful marriage as the ideal. A constant fibber may admire the virtue of truth. Even a Donald Trump may make horribly lewd remarks and still praise as an ideal those who speak courteously and respectfully.
As it happens, I don’t agree with the baroness about denying a grammar school education to bright but poor children, but she is entitled to defend her opinion.
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Perhaps an amusing illustration of the variance between symbols and reality is the choice of Sir Winston Churchill on the new “plastic” fiver.
It’s a fetching innovation, and some people regard certain examples of the new fiver as collectors’ items.
But a less worthy representative of the stability of finances could hardly have been chosen. Churchill was appalling with money. His finances have been described as a shambles.
A recent biography which examines Churchill’s spending habits (No More Champagne by David Lough) reveals that he lost the equivalent of £40,000 a year at casinos. His wine merchant’s bill was £54,000 annually, including £16,000 on champagne.
Meanwhile, he was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, and was only saved from financial disaster because he was rescued by secret benefactors.
Churchill was a peerless leader in wartime, but putting him on a fiver is hardly an advertisement for the stability of the – currently fluctuating – pound sterling.
Elizabeth Fry, from a prudent Quaker family – who still adorns the old fiver, seen proffering the Bible to women in prison – surely remains a more reliable fiscal figurehead.
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Older people have been advised by the children’s author Judith Kerr to keep a “do not resuscitate” note “in order to spare family misery” in cases of terminal illness.
The note I plan to leave will say: “If in doubt, let nature take its course.” That means “don’t kill directly” and “don’t prolong an ebbing life by extreme means”, but accept it gracefully when nature is duly taking its course. Could we have that formula encoded, please?
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