Today's Letter from Uttoxeter.

You might remember me writing about the Tea and Toast Lady who frequents the coffee shop in Uttoxeter with her nondescript husband. Well, the first thing I need to do is update her soubriquet because further observation revealed that it is she who has the Americano and her husband who has the pot of tea. She should, therefore, be known as the Toast and Americano Lady, and so it shall be henceforth.

But today the sky turned black, the ground shook fit to reduce the Town Hall to its foundations, and Millie the pigeon was seen devouring a very big buzzard she’d just despatched – and all because of an event as momentous as the murder of King Duncan: While the T&A Lady’s husband had the regulation two slices of buttered toast as usual, our re-named heroine had a chocolate twist instead. And that remarkable fact is surely adequate testimony to the conclusion that, notwithstanding her advanced age, the fact that she walks with a stick, the suggestion of dottiness, the fact that she has been a fish, a bird and a rabbit (probably in that order) during the course of previous incarnations, and the fact that she still looks like this…

  

… she is clearly a woman of substance possessed of an adventurous spirit, and the sort of person about whom anything might be revealed given the requisite passage of time. The problem is that I can no longer observe her because she’s taken to staring back at me and I get scared. So let’s move onto something a little less menacing.

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There was a woman cycling down the High Street today. She was quite a big woman, a little sagging in parts but some way short of obese, and placed somewhere in that indeterminate phase between late middle age and elderly. She was wearing all pale green clothes and riding a pale green bicycle. Only her oversized cycle helmet stood conspicuously out of step to give blessed relief to her general colour scheme. It was white. The overall impression was a mixture of eccentricity and the distaff side of the bulldog spirit.

Such women used to be a common sight in the villages and market towns of England, but since the professional classes moved in you’re more likely to see the modern breed showing off their Cartier sunglasses from the driving seat of an open-top Lexus. (I wonder what they do with their sunglasses in wintertime. I doubt they store them with the salted pork, so maybe they place them judiciously in a window to be ogled by sundry visitors and charity collectors.)

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And talking of charity collectors, there was a group of high school students with a stall and donation tins in the High Street. I spoke to one of them and learned that their charity was all about helping poor and disabled children. I put something into her tin, but couldn’t resist going back later with some bags of fancy chocolate things, just to have an excuse to say: ‘This is a pretty awful world one way and another, so thank you being young and giving your time freely to make a difference.’ And can you believe that there were about twelve of them and only one was male? It didn’t surprise me in the slightest.

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And on a marginally related note, did you know that a pair of Dolce and Gabbana DG2027B sunglasses will set you back $383,000? Doesn’t this take us into realms way beyond the absurd? I could say quite a lot about it, but I’m sure it would all be obvious so why bother?