Early to bed with a good book. I've been feeling like a damp rag today, so in the absence of anything to watch on the box, I hurled the frame upstairs and retired at 9pm with an improving book. It's a book I bought a year or so back in a charity shop. England is a Village by C Henry Warren, who I know very little about. The illustrations however are by Denys Watkins-Pitchford, who as the author known as BB, I know an awful lot about. Ostensibly this book written in the winter of 1939 and early 1940 is a lament for the loss of what had been at a time of conflict. I love English agrarian and rural history and these types of books, which while often a sentimental, semi-fictionalised-diary representing everyday comings and goings, are nonetheless crammed with facts and historical detail. One such is the age old lament that the older generations are technological Luddites, which in this tome manifests itself in two sons failing to persuade their father to buy a sugar beet lifter pulled by the new tractor, to save time and money. Father, no doubt sucking on his pipe, prefers the horse and cart and employing people from the village to lift the crop. In other words, absolutely nothing changes, just the year in which we look back, forward and argue.
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