Beneath the Empty Wessex Skies

It's all Thomas Hardy's fault, I'm sure.

But every time I come down to Dorset I come down all agnostic. The constant random and unlikely co-incidences that happen to me, rather than persuading me that there's someone constantly interfering with my good in mind, instead just leaves me wondering when the Chairperson of the Immortals will have done with having his/her sport.

So I was enjoying a meal with Mrs Voss in Dorchester yesterday (I must stop calling it Casterbridge - even though little has changed) and I heard one of the locals remark to a friend that he reckoned Von Daniken was about right, and the gods were indeed. And do you know, not only did he look a bit like Chris de Bergh, but his companion was a woman (I won't say "lady" as I don't know her social status) in red! What are the chances of that?

Safely back in Lower Charmley now, of course. And I'm hoping that the Neighbourhood Watch will shortly be lifting the curfew. There was much fear last night, with people saying that the riots might spread to the village - although many were wisely spreading calm, pointing out it's a long way down here from London and the rioters might not be able to move that fast. Anyway, they confined the one teenager in the village to his bedroom, and we seem to have made it through.

Mellstock

Well, somewhere in the vicinity of Mellstock, at any rate. Near what used to stand for the wild, untameable Egdon Heath.
All tamed now, of course. The dairymaids, wild romantics, furze-cutters, foresters and hedge-workers all gone. Likewise a severe pruning in clergymen - and even clergywomen now. No fear of an ooser as you head across to Rainbarrows. Just the danger - much greater, if more prosaic - of being run over by a hurtling car as you head up Hollow Hill in a dozen layers of Gore-Tex against the Wessex weather.
I can't help feeling that, along with TB, cholera and a high chance of death in child-birth, we've lost something important. Thomas Hardy might understand.