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Integrating myself into village life and the family walked up the road to the War Memorial for the Remembrance Day service. I sang the hymns, though stopped short of joining in the prayers, but there was no way of escaping it- I was at a church service, which is something I have fastidiously avoided since I was 28 years old and could finally tell my mum and dad that I wasn’t going to go any more and I didn’t care if they stopped my pocket money (of course they didn’t). I was 28 years old. As I said.
But I’d been tricked into attending another church service, by the clever combination of them hooking me in using the war dead and not being in church. But if felt good to join my neighbours to remember the fallen. I thought of the young soldiers who had gone to their deaths a hundred years before and wondered what they’d think if they could see us here, thinking of them (and all the other young people who’ve lost their lives over the last century). I suppose in many ways the village they left is unchanged, but the bits that were different would blow their Edwardian minds. I wondered if there would be villagers at this Memorial in another century and how much their clothes and technology would blow my tiny mind. Or if they’d be a ragbag of mutants. Or Chinese. Or aliens.
As you know, I love playing tag through time.
I’ve been catching up on Detectorists, which is a gentle, but enjoyable comedy that I am sure you all saw years ago. I had slightly mixed feelings as for a long time I had wanted to do a sitcom about archaeologists and this covered a lot of the same ground (get it) - though in my version the metal detectorists are the bad guys. For me it was the essential slowness and lack of anything happening that made this a great setting for a comedy, but the executives I pitched it to wondered what would happen. But Waiting for Godot is the best sitcom ever and that’s all about nothing happening (twice) and that this would work based on the personal relationships of the diggers and what they left buried inside themselves and what occasionally came to the surface. And Mackenzie Cook has realised all this rather brilliantly.
Round to another neighbours house tonight for some rather excellent gin and tonics. Catie dared broach the subject of Brexit. It was a daring gambit that might have destroyed our new friendships. But everyone there was Remain (or pretending to be). So we don’t have to move back to London.
