Community and No Man is an Island ( See John Donne and Treasure Island)

I have realised I have contradictory feelings about where we live. I like being ‘away from it all’ but I get irritated when we are told we live in an isolated area. ‘Isolated’ in my book is living somewhere with neighbours at least a 100 miles away, not a few yards up the lane. That is why I found a small property feature sent to me by a friend entitled, ‘This Weeks Wreck’, rather annoying. It is in our village, apparently 60 years out of date and , ‘wildly isolated’. Where had this idiot been all its life? Had it never seen a film about the Outback, the Alaskan Forests or even the Western Isles. Looks like an urbanite who doesn’t know the meaning of any of the above terms. And the wreck, incidentally, had until recently been inhabited by a respected member of the community who lived a simple life into her nineties

In fact the property is set in beautiful countryside not far from a medieval church which is in regular use, a Victorian church and hall (ditto) and is part of a string of dwellings set at regular intervals along the lane escaped the author. It even has a neighbouring house a few yards away. Should the new occupier need reassurance that there are other humans in the area the travelling library passes nearby, the postman calls everyday and the various farms all have humans tending the crops and animals. Should he need reassurance that none of this is a mirage descending on a demented ‘Ben Gun’, every so often the Church bell will ring to summon anyone who wishes to attend a service to meet up as members of the community, and the various notice boards and posters on trees will summon the occupant to all manner of secular events. The bells and the notice boards toll for everyone.

For the first 18 years of my life I couldn’t have lived more in the centre of a town, right on the cross roads of two major routes; one being the old coaching road to Dover. The idea of neighbours was something I did not experience until we moved, since Lipton’s, the Home and Colonial, the Fifty Shilling Tailors, and Burtons were pretty useless as neighbours after 5.30pm, and not much better during the day. In fact the distance to our nearest neighbours then was not much different to our nearest neighbours now.

Once a visitors opening comment to us was, ‘Oh!, couldn’t live here, its too isolated’. This was both amusing and irritating . I said she ought to be here after dark and she will see all the pin pricks of light dotted around all over the place, much easier here as we don’t have the street lighting. It was amusing because it came from a person who I new would avoid community events and in the meantime have little to do with any of the neighbours she was surrounded by.I still can’t understand those who never put in an appearance at anything. Many will have complicated and demanding lives but too many people fail to realise that privacy will eventually become their prison. Privacy is comfortable but I fear that many people are losing the knack of living together in a community. If we lose the skill of tolerance and mucking in completely then we will be in trouble. As Billy Bragg sings, ‘Sweet toleration, pride of our nation, desert us not, we are between the wars.’

Dacier