In Communion with Christine.

I got collared by Christine while I was out for a walk this afternoon. She is, it appears, the Dowager Duchess of half the dynasty that owns the local steel fabrication company, and was out walking with her young granddaughter.

Christine is the sort of Englishwoman I find hard to resist, not because there is anything innately attractive about them, but because they possess a level of friendly assertiveness that makes it easier to be pliant unless you have some pressing reason to behave otherwise. No such reason being evident at the time, I completed my walk in the company of the redoubtable Christine.

She told me off – politely, I should say – for not having yet attended the annual village fete held in the grounds of the Old Rectory. She said I wasn’t playing my part in the community. I could have explained, I suppose:

‘The reason I haven’t attended is because I’m so far off-beam that I avoid communion with the generality of village communities these days. To do so would require settling into a role with which I wouldn’t be comfortable and I’m trying to give that process up. The community wouldn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of understanding me, and so they wouldn’t relate to me, and so I wouldn’t be playing any part anyway.’

Instead, I just said I hadn’t got around to it yet.

Christine also told me she used to walk to Derby and back at one time. That’s a total of about forty miles. English women of her ilk are usually as robust physically as they are mentally, and so it’s a mildly sobering experience to be taken under the wing of one, even if only for the duration of a fifteen minute walk along a public footpath. When I mentioned my blogging habit, she said that she'd heard of 'these people who spend all day sitting at a computer.'

By the smallest of coincidences, the family business in which Christine holds such an esteemed position is in Mill Lane. There is another personage of high esteem in Mill Lane whose company I would have greatly preferred, but we can’t always have our own way, can we?