Stuck Indoors

 

I have been stuck indoors for days this not for an eagerness to hear the words of Boris Johnson on the news nor for fear of ISIS terrorists, if only the 'Tube' came this far out!  None of these things have moved me much and instead I have merely loitered here unless the desire to feed my fat face moved me elsewhere, elsewhere being Tesco or Sainsburys.  Those places, and one other now found in this town, offered me a glimpse of the creatures that have recently left school and a re pursuing a career in supermarket rip-offs.  One featured a disinterested gayboy who will not see out the month as he clearly finds work in the real work not to his liking.  It appears school has not taught him about reality and while one or two others who joined alongside him are making the most of things this one will not last.  The newer shop, B&M has in the few occasions I have been in been staffed by incompetents and wee girls with an attitude suitable for a poor soap opera, it is however unsuitable for work.  The boys do the job but the girls, including some well past adolescence, fail in every way.   The allure of a life as an 'Essex girl' may be drawing them, I suspect they watch 'TOWIE' and see it something to live up to.  Give me the elder regular checkout staff who for the most part are grown up, well most of them.

Much of my time has been taken up with catching up on things begun years ago.  A woman asked one day for information regarding a local village and we had none, no surprise there as there many villages in our area.  I decided to write out a handout for the village, and others also but never got round to it because of the interference of the war exhibitions.  Recently I managed to pick up some of the forgotten links, those not lost in the death of the old laptop, and have begun once again. 

Some villages here go back into the Iron Age, others appear to have begun just to till the fields of a Lord of the Manor, especially in Norman times, and hovels that once housed farm labourers after their long day in ploughed fields now sell for half a million or more to residents who never meet one another unless they collect the kids from school or lower themselves to get drunk in the one remaining pub, a pub the few remaining locals avoid.

It s no surprise men took to trades of any description if it took them off the land or flooded into bigger towns for work in unhealthy factories where wages were higher and rough conditions better than frozen fields.  It is no surprise also so many left voluntarily for war when the chance came, excitement, comradeship and a chance to see the world was not something a young fit man could wish to miss.  There are fifty or so memorials to those who did not return from their adventure around our district, not counting the ones in the bigger towns.

In days of old things were tougher.  If dad was working the fields the kids had to walk two or three miles on occasion into school.  Fun probably in summer but not so in winter.  Most of these kids were local but others had a long walk in to education.  I do not think most teachers had any qualifications, I am unsure when that became a requirement, but certainly on some census returns clever lassies of 16 years were noted as 'teachers.'  What did they know?  I suggest they were however more capable than the local young checkout staff of today.