Letters to the Editors
Those Awards - Why We Lost
Dear Editors,
So, no awards in the Village Magazine Awards, then. Colour glossy quarterlies were "the new black". We was robbed. Nasty shiny things may have done us down, but a thought creeps in here. was there anything else to account for this? Was 2003 the end of an era? Has our glory faded? Where is the correspondence of former times? (strains of Land of Hope & Glory fading in behind that last bit for effect, continuing into the next paragraph...)
No more does Mr Everitt write with glinty-eyed zeal against me, of the merits of the Umpteenth Earl of Somewhere, claiming for him Shakespeare's literary crown. Gone are Name Witheld* and all other anons, banished years ago (-Aunty Caroline got too much grief from others, mostly non-correspondents, to allow such things any more). Grit bins go unnoticed, undiscussed, unmentioned, and - in the case of the Fairview Grove one - unmoved, despite plans to shift the thing halfway down the road. (What happened there, then?) And, in case anyone was wondering, the overhanging hedge does not. It keeps itself to itself. Quite how, I don't know, but it does. So nothing to report there, neither. And does nobody speed any more? I've not heard anyone complain for ages.
The frogs and toads in Mr Norris's pond may be going about their spring business, but nobody mentions it. In these days of sweeping global frog demise, their presence/absence must be worth a small note somewhere, surely?
Dencora's field is ploughed! The larks are dispossessed, the slow-worms dead and gone (yes there were, I saw one once); small furry things which once kept the owls and kestrel violently happy are now just refugees in the woods, ravaged by my evil moggy - their chewed remains arrive on my kitchen floor several times a day, with more tragic manner than all the works of Shakespeare (or the Earl of thingy if you are of that persuasion). Larger vermin lives on, of course, and frolics on the rather feeble crop even as I write, in rabbity abandon. There is also a somewhat deranged pheasant which seems to be asking someone to shoot it, judging by its attention-seeking behaviour. This evening it decided that the undergrowth afforded too much cover so it clung unsteadily to the spindliest and most leafless branches of a tree at the end of the garden squawking, until it fell off. Entertaining this may be, but the tractor which turned up all those weeks ago and churned the field over left no time to ponder whether there might have been some other way to end the bike saga, one which didn't involve turning it over to a wildlifeless crop. But there it was, gone. So nothing more to write about the field, then. Except that the crop seems to be turning yellow. What will happen if it all dies? A cropless barren wasteland, maybe? Not the magnitude of the rainforest perhaps, but could the desertification of the Fen already have begun here?
The bikes are silent and gone too! (Actually that's not true - but they aren't in the field, at least. I just put that in for a bit of colour).
Me, I have joined the system, become a feature writer, a columnist. I interview and write profiles of people who live round here. It's a lovely task, and I wouldn't want to give it up. It's a privilege, it really is. But we are tamed, us correspondents. We behave ourselves. We write nice things. Haven't we in consequence made this a...a less..original magazine?
* Yes that was me, before Mr E girds up his loins and his pen for battle again...
...But Never Mind
Dear Editors,
We're sorry you didn't get a mention in the Village Magazine competition.
Please don't change the format - we like it as it is. We don't need glossy pages and we read it once a month to keep up-to-date with what's going on in the village.
And we like it to be free!
Keep up the good work.