Scarecrows

As time has gone by, a great many rural English villages have been consumed by their nearest towns, or else become little more than dormitory villages: a place where people do little more than eat and sleep in-between their commutes to-and-from their distant workplaces1.

And so it pleases me at least a little that the tiny village I’ve lived in for five years this week still shows great success in how well it clings on to its individual identity.

Panoramic view of a village green, flanked by houses, around which several decorative boards have been erected: made to look like old-fashioned televisions, each shows a photograph of an event in the village's past.
Right now our village green is surrounded by flags, bunting, and thematic decorations.

Every summer since time immemorial, for example, it’s hosted a Village Festival, and this year it feels like the community’s gone all-out. The theme this year is A Century in Television, and most of the festivities seem to tie-in to the theme.

Human-sized scarecrows of classic childrens' TV characters Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men and their friend Little Weed, constructed mostly out of plant pots, standing at the corner of a road by a wood-panelled outbuilding.
If you recognise these characters from their first time around on British television, you’re probably older than I am. If you recognise them from their 2001 “reboot”, then you’re probably younger.

I’ve been particularly impressed this year by entrants into the (themed) scarecrow competition: some cracking scarecrows (and related decorations) have started popping up around the village in advance of festival week!

A lifesize mannequin of kids' TV character Bob the Builder stands on scaffolding that's being used by an actual builder who's constructing hip-roof dormer windows.
Bob the Builder’s helping out with the reconstruction of the roof of one of the houses down towards the end of my hamlet, just outside the village proper.

There’s a clear bias towards characters from childrens’ television programmes, but that only adds to the charm. Not only does it amuse the kids when we walk by them, but it feeds into the feeling of nostalgia that the festival theme seems to evoke (as well, perhaps, as a connection to the importance of this strange village tradition).

A scarecrow of Postman Man, alongside a cardboard cutout of Jess (his black-and-white cat), sits atop a stone wall. The wall contains an in-wall Royal Mail postbox, and the thatched house behind is called Letterbox Cottage, contributing to the theme for this scarecrow.
Well-played, Letterbox Cottage. Well-played.

If you took a wrong turning and found your way through our village when you meant to be somewhere else, you’d certainly be amused, bemused, or both by the plethora of figures standing on street corners, atop hedgerows, and just generally around the place2.

Large scarecrows of two anthropomorphic sheep, the smaller one holding a teddy bear, stood atop a hedgerow.
Shaun the Sheep and what I believe must be his cousin Timmy stand atop a hedge looking down on a route used by many children on their way to school.

The festival, like other events in the local calendar, represents a collective effort by the “institutions” of the village – the parish council, the church, the primary school, etc.

But the level of time and emotional investment from individual households (whether they’re making scarecrows for the Summer festival… decorating windows as a Christmas advent calendar… turning out for a dog show last week, I hear3…) shows the heart of a collective that really engage with this kind of community. Which is really sweet.

Red-headed 'thing-on-a-spring' Zebedee, from The Magic Roundabout, in scarecrow form.
An imaginative use of a coloured lampshade plus some excellent tinfoil work makes Zebedee here come to life. He could only have been more-thematic if he’d been installed on the village’s (only) roundabout!

Anyway, the short of it is that I feel privileged to live in a village that punches above its weight class when it comes to retaining its distinctive personality. And seeing so many of my neighbours, near and far, putting these strange scarecrows out, reminded me of that fact.

Composite photograph showing 11 more scarecrows, including a BBC newscaster, a Casualty surgeon, Spongebob Squarepants, and the bar at the Rovers Return.
I’m sure I’m barely scraping the surface – there are definitely a few I know of that I’ve not managed to photograph yet – but there are a lot of scarecrows around my way, right now.

Footnotes

1 The “village” in which our old house resided certainly had the characteristic feel of “this used to be a place of its own, but now it’s only-barely not just a residential estate on the outskirts of Oxford, for example. Kidlington had other features, of course, like Oxford’s short-lived zoological gardens… but it didn’t really feel like it had an identity in its own right.

2 Depending on exactly which wrong turn you took, the first scarecrow you saw might well be the one dressed as a police officer – from some nonspecific police procedural drama, one guesses? – that’s stood guard shortly after the first of the signs to advertise our new 20mph speed limit. Holding what I guess is supposed to be a radar gun (but is clearly actually a mini handheld vacuum cleaner), this scarecrow might well be having a meaningful effect on reducing speeding through our village, and for that alone it might be my favourite.

3 I didn’t enter our silly little furball into the village dog show, for a variety of reasons: mostly because I had other things to do at the time, but also because she’s a truculent little troublemaker who – especially in the heat of a Summer’s day – would probably just try to boss-around the other dogs.

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Easy Socialising

This weekend I invited over a bunch of our old university buddies, and it was great.

We still didn’t feel up to a repeat of the bigger summer party we held the year before last, but we love our Abnib buddies, so put the call out to say: hey, come on over, bring a tent (or be willing to crash on a sofa bed) if you want to stay over; we’ll let the kids run themselves ragged with a water fight and cricket and football and other garden games, then put them in front of a film or two while we hang out and drink and play board games or something.

14 adults, 8 children, and a dog stand on/in front of a garden climbing frame: Dan is in the centre.
Every one of these people is awesome. Or else a dog.

The entire plan was deliberately low-effort. Drinks? We had a local brewery drop us off a couple of kegs, and encouraged people to BYOB. Food? We threw a stack of pre-assembled snacks onto a table, and later in the day I rotated a dozen or so chilled pizzas through the oven. Entertainments? Give the kids a pile of toys and the adults one another’s company.

We didn’t even do more than the bare minimum of tidying up the place before people arrived. Washing-up done? No major trip hazards on the floor? That’s plenty good enough!

A man wearing a cap pours himself a beer from a 10-litre box.
The intersection of “BYOB” and the generosity of our friends somehow meant that, I reckon, we have more alcohol in the house now than before the party!

I found myself recalling our university days, when low-effort ad-hoc socialising seemed… easy. We lived close together and we had uncomplicated schedules, which combined to make it socially-acceptable to “just turn up” into one another’s lives and spaces. Many were the times that people would descend upon Claire and I’s house in anticipation that there’d probably be a film night later, for example1.

I remember one occasion a couple of decades ago, chilling with friends2. Somebody – possibly Liz – commented that it’d be great if in the years to come our kids would be able to be friends with one another. I was reminded of it when our eldest asked me, of our weekend guests, “why are all of your friends’ children are so great?”

A group of adults stand around on a patio, socialising.
It’s not the same as those days long ago, but I’m not sure I’d want it to be. It is, however, fantastic.

What pleased me in particular was how relatively-effortless it was for us all to slip back into casually spending time together. With a group of folks who have, for the most part, all known each other for over two decades, even not seeing one another in-person for a couple of years didn’t make a significant dent on our ability to find joy in each other’s company.

Plus, being composed of such laid-back folks, it didn’t feel awkward that we had, let’s face it, half-arsed the party. Minimal effort was the order of the day, but the flipside of that was that the value-for-effort coefficient was pretty-well optimised3.

A delightful weekend that I was glad to be part of.

Footnotes

1 That Claire and I hosted so many social events, both regular and unplanned, eventually lead us to the point that it was the kind of thing we considered whenever we moved house!

2 Perhaps at the Ship & Castle, where we spent a reasonable amount of our education.

3 I’m pretty sure that if I’d have used the term “value-for-effort coefficient” at the party, though, then it’d have immediately sucked 100% of the fun out of the room.

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Buying Another House

Seven years ago, I wrote a six-part blog series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) about our Ruth, JTA and I’s experience of buying our first house. Now, though, we’re moving again, and it’s brought up all the same kinds of challenges and stresses as last time, plus a whole lot of bonus ones to boot.

Our house in Kidlington
Our old house – seen here in 2013 – has served its purpose. It’s time for us to move on.

In particular, new challenges this time around have included:

  • As owners, rather than renters, we’ve had both directions on the ladder to deal with. Not only did we have to find somewhere to move to that we can afford but we needed to find somebody who’d buy our current house (for enough money that we can afford the new place).
  • The first letting agents we appointed were pretty useless, somehow managing to get us no viewings whatsoever. Incidentally their local branch got closed soon after we ditched them and the last time I checked, the building was still up for sale: it doesn’t bode well for them that they can’t even sell their own building, does it?
  • The replacement letting agents (who sold us this house in the first place) were much better, but it still took a long time before we started getting offers we could act on.
  • We finally selected some buyers, accepting a lower offer because they were cash buyers and it would allow us to act quickly on the property we wanted to buy, only for the coronavirus lockdown to completely scupper our plans of a speedy move. And make any move a logistical nightmare.
  • Plus: we’re now doing this with lots more stuff (this won’t be a “rally some friends and rent a van” job like last time!), with two kids (who’re under our feet a lot on account of the lockdown), and so on.
Dan with his solar panels.
We added significant value to our old house during the time we owned it, for example by installing solar panels which continue to generate income as well as “free” energy. As well as being now conveniently close to a train line to London which I suppose would be good for commuters even though we’ve mostly used it for fun.

But it’s finally all coming together. We’ve got a house full of boxes, mind, and we can’t find anything, and somehow it still doesn’t feel like we’re prepared for when the removals lorry comes later this week. But we’re getting there. After a half-hour period between handing over the keys to the old place and picking up the keys to the new place (during which I guess we’ll technically be very-briefly homeless) we’ll this weekend be resident in our new home.

The Green, our new home
Our new home’s pretty delightful. I’ll vlog you a tour or something once we’re moved in, under the assumption that a housewarming party is still likely to be rendered impossible by coronavirus.

Our new house will:

  • Be out in the fabulous West Oxfordshire countryside.
  • Have sufficient rooms to retain an office and a “spare” bedroom while still giving the kids each their own bedroom.
  • Boast a fabulously-sized garden (we might have already promised the kids a climbing frame).
  • Have an incredible amount of storage space plus the potential for further expansion/conversion should the need ever arise. (On our second-to-last visit to the place with discovered an entire room, albeit an unfinished one, that we hadn’t known about before!)
  • Get ludicrously fast Internet access.

We lose some convenient public transport links, but you can’t have everything. And with me working from home all the time, Ruth – like many software geeks – likely working from home for the foreseeable future (except when she cycles into work), and JTA working from home for now but probably returning to what was always a driving commute “down the line”, those links aren’t as essential to us as they once were.

Sure: we’re going to be paying for it for the rest of our lives. But right now, at least, it feels like what we’re buying is a house we could well live in for the rest of our lives, too.

I certainly hope so. Moving house is hard.

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