It would only be with hesitancy that I would point a finger at any youth. Were we regarded as hooligans and tearaways when we were young? Maybe we were not as bad as that, or maybe we were worse. Maybe, there were even expletives shouted at us if we had been especially annoying.

Apart from the bicycles on which we rode, we didn’t own anything, but treated the village and its environs in a proprietorial manner. Nothing would annoy us more than someone who assumed the right to come in …

The storms of the past week are a familiar March experience, certainly part of the March experience in our small Somerset village.

The worst moment in a storm was the time the garage took off.  The wind had got under the doors of the asbestos-walled garage and the whole structure was lifting off the ground. No garage we ever had stayed empty long enough to accommodate a car, it would have been filled with all sorts of things for which there was no room in the house.

My father was …

Of course, I knew where the River Brue was, anyone who travelled between Street and Glastonbury would know exactly where the River Brue was. As you cross the river on the A39, a roadside sign announces “Pomparles Bridge.” Apparently, the name derives from French for “perilous bridge.” There never seemed much that was perilous about the Brue, a shallow, gentle, slow flowing river.

Drivers on the M5 motorway between Bristol and Taunton could tell you where the River Brue was. There is a sign that tells the countless drivers that …