RERUM # 12
The house has been ours since last Friday. We ëcompletedí undramatically at around noon & collected the keys after work. Today, with the kids in nursery, Emma & I went over to measure up. Weíre having the kitchen knocked into the main living room area so it will be a large kitchen-diner. The wall between this main room & the smaller front room (for the Victorians, a parlour) has already been breached & the two rooms are joined through a wide archway. In the argot of the estate agent, the garden is ëlaid largely to lawní. In our case this means wildly overgrown with nettles, dock, ragwort & thistles. But, once the flora have been laid low, there will be plenty of room at the far end to put up a 12í-by-10í garden office plus a smaller hut as an art studio for Emma. Both will mark the boundary of the garden along the bank of a dried out ditch that flanks a field, most of which is now turned over to allotments.
Itís been a day of bright sunshine & fast-moving cloud & it was a joy to stand in the garden listening to the wind & the birds in the high beeches between the houses & the allotments beyond. I walked by footpath to the village store, passing between little clumps of council & ex-council bungalows, each with its own burgeoning garden. These bungalows, & the houses in Lawns Close, are probably no more than 50 years old, but they seem to have settled into the folds & creases of the land very comfortably & they now have the aspect of some of the much older cottages that flank the High Street.
I havenít lived in a village since moving up here from Rowledge in Surrey 13 years ago. The Offleys (Great & Little) have the distinction of appearing in the Domesday Book, which establishes their credentials as bona fide pre-Norman settlements. They appear alternately as Offelei & Offelgi, both names lending some credence to the possibility that Offa, the 8th century Saxon King of Mercia, built a palace in the area, thus giving his name to the village. There are two notable buildings, one in Great Offley & the other in Little. Offley Place is an impressive manor house originally erected in Tudor times but substantially rebuilt in 1810. At Little Offley there is a more complete Tudor manor house. The road due south winds through countryside largely unaltered during hundreds of years. Kingís Walden & St Paulís Walden are two of the villages close by, the latter the seat of the Bowes Lyons, the family from which the Queen Mother came.
I have just realised that most of this reads like a Tourist Board publicity handout. I shall stop since I can sense my syllables becoming clipped & metallic & my vowels rounding out (rinding ite, for those who require phonetic guidance) into the distinctive clatter & twang of the South-Eastern High Tory. More bulletins anon as we attack the interior of the houseÖ
11:12:21 PM 
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