legacies of a village

The best time to send a thank you card is the day after the party.  It's easy to leave it hanging in the air for a couple of days, while feeling vaguely guilty and disorganised, but better by far to simply write the thing and post it, or send an email, or a text, or decide it was the sort of informal do where further thanks beyond those you trilled as you departed would be OTT.  Whatever you opt for, choose something, do it and have done with it.  If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.  And so I wrote a card, wondering as I stuck a left-over pictorial Madonna stamp on the envelope quite how many Christmas cards I'd thought I was intending to send, and walked down to the post box.

The box is around a ten minute walk, by the time you've gone round three sides of a large rectangle.  I'm amazed the Royal Mail keeps it going, in this day and age of needing to cut overheads, and pushing the price of postage up to the point where you could practically buy a cup of tea for the cost of one first class stamp.  It sits on the boundary between our spinney and the neighbour's garden, with no more than twelve or fifteen houses within half a mile of it.  The heart of the village, such as it is, upped sticks and moved half way across the parish a long while ago, so that the church has been a private dwelling since some time in the 1970s, the manor mentioned in Domesday is by now just another farm house with business units, and the old school was already a home by the time we moved here.  Only the post box remains to show that back in the eleventh century this was the nominal heart of a village.  The lettuce farm might go and stuff all their business letters into the box, but my bet is that they don't, and why the Royal Mail keeps a post box in a rural lane that must see all of three letters a week posted in it beats me.

When I'm busy in the garden I often jump into the car to go to the post box, thus joining the ranks of those eco-unfriendly people who use their cars for short journeys.  It is a bad habit, but there are times when you don't want to take twenty minutes out of your working day simply to post a letter. However, my residual cold still lurked threateningly enough to convince me that crawling around through my sodden borders in the biting wind would be a seriously silly idea, even if the sun was shining for a change and water not actually falling from the sky.  Taking a short, brisk walk as far as the post box was my nod to getting some exercise without getting damp, or chilled.

The graveyard on the other side of the road is no longer used for burials, which presumably ceased when the church was deconsecrated, but a couple of workmen in a council van turn up every now and again to cut the grass and tidy the shrubs, so it is kept up about as much as you'd want it to be, not overgrown but romantically dishevelled.  The metal gate was stolen many months ago, and has still not been replaced, despite occasional mentions in the parish magazine suggesting it has not actually been forgotten, but remains on somebody's list of things to do.  It is quite nice that there isn't a gate, since it was always kept padlocked, and there are lots of snowdrops growing among the gravestones, which one used to only be able to stare at wistfully through the bars.  Today I stepped through the gateway, and spent some time admiring them, standing in thick clumps among the heart shaped leaves of celandines.  I do not want celandines in my own borders, but am charmed to be able to go and look at them in a disused graveyard.