Community

In one sense, this was just another Thursday. I got out to the supermarket at the proper time (before breakfast, before most people), it was much chillier than it had been at bedtime so that the open bedroom window seemed to be admitting an icy blast (exaggeration, but still ...), I caught up on some errands between breakfast and coffee (collecting some travel document from the travel agent), fitting in my Italian practice just before midday came and robbed me of points accrued last evening. 

But in another sense, it was an extraordinary day  of what I can only describe as being reminded of community. Not the community of which I recognise myself of being a part, such as I find at church, or choir, or Pilates class - a wider community of whose members I don't often feel aware. For a start there was the supermarket interactions - the cheery man who hailed me as I appeared where he was loading shelves, shared some banter, discussed the apparently random shifting of items in the shop so that the mushrooms had changed aisles and the oils were round the corner from their accustomed home; the former colleague whom I hadn't seen for such a long time that I'd assumed she had moved away or died. 

Even more extraordinary were no fewer than three encounters in the space of a couple of hours in the afternoon. I'd been falling asleep on the garden bench - the hard, uncomfortable one - and had felt so hot that I knew I had to move and get some air, so we walked up to the church for me to leave some concert tickets for someone to sell while I'm away on Sunday. We passed a house that's been gradually undergoing a transformation over the last few years just as a young woman came out in time to hear me say "That's a splendid wall." "Just finished yesterday!" she told us - and somehow we found ourselves having a lengthy conversation about Victorian houses, about her new business venture (about which we knew, but not whose business it was becoming) - and about who we were, and how she'd thought she'd recognised us, and ... and ... 

And then we were up at the church. I'd done what I'd come for, and taken a few photos in the quiet afternoon light - the empty cross with the discarded crown of thorns and a white robe draped where the red robe of Good Friday had been - and were having a wander round the graveyard listening to a blackbird when first a middle-aged woman came round the corner, smiled, said hello - and then her partner, more loquacious, and a conversation began ... and both turned out to be distant former pupils (now in their mid-fifties) who thought they'd recognised us. The chap had been in Himself's class, the woman in mine when I was still teaching RE (which I did when I first returned to teaching in the early '80s) That conversation went on for ages as they recognised how many of the congregation they knew, and when we parted the man said, suddenly and unexpectedly: "Don't you think it's lovely to realise you're part of a community even if you don't think about it?"

The third encounter of the day came as we were walking home and a voice from above our heads hailed us: one of my former pupils who now taught in the school and who for a while had been an invaluable colleague to Himself when he was a teacher down in his department. Another conversation, another moment of realisation, another underlining of the cohesion of a small town even when you feel you no longer see the people you used to know. 

The photo is of some of the trees that border the graveyard at the church; beyond them is the former Rectory which we sold last year, and to the left the field which the church now owns and for which we have plans ... I love the way the trees are covered in that froth of green at this time of year. 

And if it doesn't rain tomorrow here, I'll be watering these pots again!