The bells, the bells

There are, to be sure, certain benefits to living in a village. Chief among them is the sense of snobbery you can exhibit when you give your address and it conjures up an image of a hamlet with a pub, a post office and houses starting in the high-to-nosebleed-inducing price range.

The truth is likely to be somewhat different. These days, if you live in a village near a city, you most probably live in a ‘village’. Certainly, when I was growing up in the Wild West Midlands, villages were approached across open fields and they usually had a duck pond and inbreeding.

The duck pond is, I think, the measure of a true village. That or a horse trough – but only if full of water. If it’s full of flowers planted in an attempt to clinch third best runner up in the regional finals of ‘Britain in bloom’ then it’s not a horse trough, it’s just an impractical window box. A full horse trough can also take the place of a duck pond in a witch trial emergency. If you don’t know what I mean by witch trial emergency then you obviously live in a city, town or ‘village’ rather than a village.

I don’t live in a village, but I live pretty close to a ‘village’. In fact I walk into the village every morning and evening of the working week. It’s pretty easy to tell where the village begins and ends, it’s where the church and pubs are located, along with the houses designed for an age where malnutrition and rickets meant that five foot was a practical height for a ceiling. And I do pick up a little of village life. I see the same people every morning (but because this is England I don’t say hello,). If you bought one of the doll houses in the ‘village’ you would probably think that you were on a par with a proper village like they have in deepest Wales, only without the crushing sense of isolation and the hostility that would be shown towards incomers. Oh, and with better transport links and easy access to the airport so that you can go and visit your villa in another village in Croatia, where all that ethnic cleansing was just terrible but did open up some real bargains in the property market.

What you also get in a village is a church with a steeple. This means bells. Or it did.

It wasn’t until I heard the bells peeling a few Sundays ago that I realised they had not been ringing. Some sort of clapper issue, one assumes. Not so, apparently somebody had an injunction out against them.

An injunction. Against bells. In England.

What kind of execrable scum moves to a village and takes out an injunction against church bells? I’m assuming it’s an incomer because otherwise it’s somebody who suddenly has an objection, i.e. has gone mad. The church was there before the objector. What the hell were they expecting when they saw the steeple with the shutters in it?

This is on a par with people who move next door to pubs and then kick up a fuss about noise and dray-horses eating their flower beds.

Whoever it is (now the most reviled person in the area), I’m glad their petty injunction has been overturned and I’m doubly glad that this resulted in the bells peeling out for more than an hour on Sundays. I’d like to see some little Englander try that shit if it was a mineret and not a steeple they wanted to silence. Those Mohamaddens don’t fuck about when it comes to making their feelings known. Neither do campenologists, it would appear, as the warm weather means sleeping with windows open, meaning that I was able to hear, at half two in the morning the other night, the soft chime of the church bell striking the half hour. Good to know that even in the still watches of the night when the body is at its lowest ebb, there is a cheering chime that allows one to turn over, smile, and go back to a restful sleep.