“Oh , you’re so lucky living in Bath , it’s such a wonderful , lovely , historic place . ” People say , and all you can think of is the awful parking , the tourist crowding , the expensive shops , and the terrible traffic…
Luckily I don’t live in Bath but nearly ten miles away in a village called Limpley Stoke in the Avon Valley . It seems to be normal in the countryside these days for professional people who work in the town to prefer to live in the villages ; this makes the housing so expensive that the villagers and agricultural workers have to live in the cheaper houses in town , with the result that the farmers commute out to the farm and everyone else commutes in . Certainly , there’s nobody in the village who could be called and old-style villager . The people nearest to me include pilot , a British Rail manager , a retired French teacher …not a farm worker among them . But I don’t think there is anything wrong with that －it’s just that the nature of villages is changing and there is still quite a strong sense of community (社区)here . A lot of this sense of community comes from the Post Office , which is a centre for all the information . I find out what is going on while I am there , pretending to control my two-year-old son . He enjoys anything he can touch at the lowest level of the shop , where there is a big pile of cards saying “Congratulations on your 9th birthday ” and a collecting tin for the “Save the Children ” charity (慈善团体) which he always picks up and tries to run away with . My feeling is that if my son took the money collected for the children it would go directly where it was needed , but they don’t see it like that .
Working at home , I like to wander round the village at times when other people are at the office , which has given me a reputation (名声) for being lazy or rich , but I still don’t get enough time to look after the garden we bought . My wife had a good idea for the first year . “Let’s just leave it and see what comes up .” We did . There were some nice plants among the weeds . She had a good idea for the second year as well . “Why don’t we leave it and see if it all comes up again ?” We did , and that is why we need to hire a full-time gardener this year .