wedlake2

The worst thing about the development of the village is not the size, but the traffic - the sheer volume of cars.

We could kick a football all the way to school - too dangerous now.

The great thing about staying somewhere a long time is the sense of belonging which you get .. the sort of depth ..

......you don't just know the living, you know the dead people ......

... Ken Collins can say 'Do you remember going to Dr Maxwell's funeral, in January 1936' and you can say 'yes, and we had such-and-such a hymn'.

I quite like that.

I should miss that if I lived somewhere else, I suppose.

Over the years the meat has got better - leaner pork, better bacon.

If you look at these heads on the wall, the rings tell us this must be 6 years old, probably pulled the plough a bit ......

.... you wouldn't be able to grill anything out of there. That would've had to be braised or boiled.

It's only on the wall as a classic butcher's bullock of the time, the turn of the century.

Michael Clark said he thought it might be a Blue Albion.

I don't think meat has increased in price relative to income in my time

People are demanding meat much leaner and easier to cook.

.I've got a price list back to 1954, and it's amazing how it appears to have gone up, but if you relate it to income .....

I'm sentimentally attached to the tiles.
These are portraits traced onto the tile.
There's a sheep here.

The tiles were made-to-measure for the shop. Each wall has a portrait, so it must have been quite an expensive job when it was done, I should think.

I've got one over at the house to remind me when I retire of the long sentence I served in Wrington !

I don't think I could bear to leave Wrington when I retire

There used to be a class-distinction in the churchyard. If you were a regular churchgoer and communicant, you could be buried near the south door.

There was a case Howard Yeates told me, when he was grave-digging, a family came up to him and said 'don't put father there. That's next to so-and-so, and he couldn't stand him' !

The ideal place to be buried, you see, is in church. The last person to be buried inside was somebody called Gallop, in 1860-something I think.

I rather fancy the South Porch .....

..... a long time hence, I may say.