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every paragraph. Mitzi settled happily and sleepily into her pillows to enjoy the second-hand thrills. It was clearly the only way she was going to get any sort of buzz now. After all, nothing exciting was ever going to happen to her in Hazy Hassocks, was it? She’d just have to get used to being bored rigid for the rest of her life. She sighed and turned another page.

Chapter Three
    It was still raining when Mitzi woke. She opened her eyes, sleepily stroked Richard and Judy and realised that she didn’t have to get up. Not this morning or any other morning. With a small grunt of pleasure she hauled the duvet further over her shoulders and closed her eyes again. Another five minutes’ sleep would be blissful.
    An hour and a half later, staggering downstairs just in time to see a far more perky Lulu off to work, Mitzi enjoyed the lazy luxury of three cups of coffee in front of the television while still in her pyjamas. Then, having fed Richard and Judy, she showered, dressed quickly and popped next door for the promised elevenses with Flo.
    As this involved four more cups of coffee, a packet of Viennese Whirls, and the Spanish Inquisition on Lulu’s defunct love life, by midday Mitzi was both jizzing with caffeine and rather shell-shocked by her first self-indulgent morning.
    She stood dithering on Flo’s front path beneath her dripping umbrella as the burnished leaves flapped and slapped damply round her feet. Should she go home straight away and start the life-laundry? Or should she go into the village and find out exactly what was on offer for a lady of leisure in Hazy Hassocks?
    It seemed so odd not only to have a choice, but also to have all the time in the world in which to make it. Used torunning to a tight schedule with her day neatly mapped, this endless stretching ahead of time seemed a bit daunting. So, why not put all these extra hours to good use and do both things? Village first, and then she’d come home and have a late lunch and make a start on clearing out the years of accumulated tat. Lulu could then take it all to her animal welfare charity shop, so they’d both be happy.
    Delighted that she’d made two major decisions in a matter of minutes and therefore wasn’t losing either her business acumen or her marbles, Mitzi turned up the collar of her trench coat, pushed her umbrella into the wind and headed towards Hazy Hassocks’s high street.
    From the dental surgery at one end to The Faery Glen at the other, the high street wove its sinuous way through a random planting of stately sycamores and a mishmash of shopfronts. A few of the buildings, skew-whiff and half-timbered, dated back centuries to the original village; others had been added on and embellished over each decade since. Between them they offered practically everything anyone could wish for, if you looked hard enough. Hazy Hassocks residents only ever needed to make sorties into Winterbrook – or further afield to Reading or Newbury – for things like personal banking and superstores and the joys of Marks & Spencer.
    The first thing that struck Mitzi was how many people there were. Not shoppers as such, more moochers. People, even on this wet and blustery day, drifting from shop window to shop window, simply staring. As if being buffeted by a chill north-westerly and having raindrops trickling down their necks while window-shopping on the high street was preferable to being somewhere else doing nothing at all.
    And the second thing she noticed was that they were all about her own age.
    Were there really that many baby boomers either out of work or retired? Had she just been added to the tip of a growing middle-aged redundancy mountain? Was everyindustry being taken over by youthful Troy and Tyler clones?
    It was thoroughly dispiriting to think that she was now part of this unseen grey army, although she realised she was luckier than most financially, at least in the short-term. Early retirement meant she’d receive her small monthly