Poetic Licence: Travels In Boughton Paidfor
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Your support makes all the difference.The Gloucestershire village of Lower Slaughter has no telephone box, public lavatory or post office. The 179 households of the Cotswold parish
have voted against them in case they encourage tourists
Should I don Tattersall checked shirt
multipocketed action trousers and
garden cardigan? Then with quiet rabidity,
begin snipping the late-summer fronds
of the wistaria from the honey stone
walls of my Boughton Paidfor cottage?
Should I, while nightingales sing in my
garden, peruse my Dyspeptic Reader's
Book of The English Village and sip
wine club oloroso, as a drunken wasp
rustles the dried flower display in the trug
under the planished hod in my inglenook?
What of the tartan blanket which my wife
has placed in the utility room to prevent
the Jack Russells, Barnaby and Tancred,
from making the washing machine muddy
with their scritty little paws? What of our
little brass fleurs-de Lys hall ornaments?
What will become of our quiet traditions?
The Rover idling on Saturday mornings
prior to the weekly shopping trip to Waitrose?
The contented roar of the garden tractor on
Sundays? The re-assuring blink of the standby
light on the Intruder Alert under the eaves?
If there were a public phone, a lavatory
or a post office, People might come.
People staring at us while eating ice creams.
Imagining their own plaster donkeys in our
speedwell-splashed gardens. OUR gardens.
And the coaches. Dear God, the coaches.
We must call an emergency meeting.
Mrs Cosy McTwee, Rtd Brigadier Mindset
Mr and Mrs Barn-Conversion and
the Newmoneys from Dalmatian Cottage.
Some of them have been here for so long,
they can remember the villagers moving out.
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