Some weather and quite a lot of nostalgia.

 I looked out of the window first thing. It looked fine so I got organised to go for a morning run. The weather app on my phone suggested that no rain was forecast in the immediate future. I opened the door. It was raining! I went back inside for a raincoat. 

I began to think Chicken Licken was right and that the sky had indeed fallen in. 

 But there was some reassuring blue as  well.

And so the day has continued with bits of sunshine and intermittent rain showers. 

Here’s a photo of a small town square in southern France, a scene that could come from Marcel Pagnol’s ‘Jean de Florette’ or ‘Manon de Sources’’, a nostalgic view of small village life, just waiting for some older chaps to come out and play a game of ‘boules’. 

Now according to this article the bistro which should be the heart of French village life is disappearing. As small shops close in villages and small towns, in England as well as France, and as more people drive to a supermarket or even have their groceries delivered, the regular chat and exchange of gossip in the shops disappears. And if the bistro goes too, where will people meet to keep up to date with local scandal. It’s another aspect of the isolation of modern life, I suppose. But local people are organising rotas to keep places open.

Our village used to have a butcher’s shop, two greengroceries, two bakeries, a wool-shop-haberdashery a sweetshop (with a strict shopkeeper who only allowed three schoolchildren in at a time) a post office and the Co-op store. Not to mention six pubs. Now we have the post office and the Co-op and a cafe cum gift shop. Oh, and what was the sweetshop, which stood empty for a long time, a couple of years ago reinvented itself as a sort of haberdashery and clothing repair place. The former wool-shop became a wine bar briefly but is now up for sale. The other shops have turned into private houses. 

The people who live here and commute to work elsewhere probably don’t shop locally. I get certain essentials from the Co-op but also regard shopping in nearby Uppermill which still has a bakery and a greengrocery and a butcher’s shop (which I don’t frequent) as ‘shopping locally’.m

Even one of the pubs has turned into a suite of offices; the others serve food and organise tapas evenings and bingo nights to keep going. They come into their own when the Band Contest takes place on Whit Friday. But they keep going. As does the local library, run by volunteers, as is the slightly larger branch in Uppermill, both linked to the main library based in Oldham town centre.

Village life, small town life continues but I get the impression that it’s a mix of older retired folk like us and commuters. But maybe working from home helps keep village life going; there is a theatre behind the library, where a film society still keeps going and there is a ‘Wake Up Delph’ committee. We still have a local primary school but I doubt that the children attending that school will be able to afford houses here when they grow up. 

Since I seem to be on a nostalgia-fest, here’s a link to an article where several famous people reflect on going back to re-visit their childhood homes. It’s interesting that most of them did not want to go inside. One of them commented, “ I realised I did not want to go inside at all. I wanted to preserve the architecture of my memory. Every room held another version of me.” 

I can understand that. As a small child I lived in my grandparent’s house, before my parents qualified for a council house of their own. When my grandmother moved into sheltered old people’s accommodation, we made a council house swop  and moved back to what had been her house. Many years later my parents purchased that house and when my mother became too infirm to live independently she sold the house to my niece and her husband. Now, I have overlaying memories of that house: furnished in my grandmother’s style - a large round table that folded up against the wall, a piano, a heavy sideboard with the budgerigar’s cage on it - reworked by my parents into 1960s -1970s style, and changed again at the turn of the century. It’s quite disconcerting to stand in that living room! My son refuses to go in the house. He wants to remember it as his grandmother’s house. 

Here’s a bit of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy philosophy to finish off this nostalgia-driven post:

Life goes on . Stay safe and well, everyone!