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village is only a few miles away. Perhaps you should try there,’ she went on. ‘You can walk it in an hour.’
    â€˜So much for local hospitality!’ I thought bleakly.
    I left the cafeteria to look for an inn. There had to be a tavern somewhere in the village where I could while away the day over a few pints of beer and have a roof over my head for the night. I had been warned by my army colleagues that civvy street could be a damned hard place when leaving the service and they were being proved to be correct. I didn’t expect to find it so difficult. However, despite searching high and low, walking through all the streets, I could not find a tavern. How odd, I thought. A village without a public house. What a loss to the community! It seemed that the only place where the people met was at the village hall. This had to be the strangest place in the country!
    I returned to the shops, looking through the windows at the goods displayed there. It seemed that the villagers thrived on cottage industries. There were no electrical goods... not one with television sets or computers... nor were there cookers or microwaves or refrigerators for sale. Secondly, the provisions stores stocked no branded goods at all. They simply sole fruit and vegetables which apparently had been grown locally. Thirdly, all the other goods sold in the shops were manufactured or produced by the villagers themselves. There was wool to make clothes and blankets, linen to manufacture sheets, bedding, kindling wood for the fire, seeds by which to grow crops, a hardware store which mainly sold minor goods for repairs such as glues and fillers, while others stocked goods relating to weaving, carpentry, pottery and the like. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that the village had moved into the twenty-first century... and there were no motor cars with the exception of my own.
    Lost in the vacuum of eternity, I returned to the cafeteria. The woman behind the counter was tired of seeing me but there was nothing I could do about it.
    Shortly PC7 entered the room and he sat down opposite me.
    â€˜They’ve towed your motor car away to a garage to be repaired,’ he told me,’ staring directly into my eyes.
    â€˜I know,’ I responded tiredly, dampening down my temper for I felt like striking him between the eyes for the useless information. ‘I’ll be glad to get rid of this village the sooner it’s done!’
    â€˜That’s the attitude,’ he said amiably. ‘I’m sure you can understand our wish to remain singular.
    â€˜Not really,’ I retorted curtly. ‘I don’t understand why you haven’t got a tavern... or why there’s no electrical goods on sale. Everything here seems to go back a century or even longer.’
    â€˜No, no, no!’ he protested. ‘It’s just your imagination. Everyone here loves life. No... we don’t have an inn... nor do we have any of those newfangled electrical things that muddle up the mind... or anything that takes away people’s attention. We live the pure life... the happy life... the contented life.’
    â€˜You could have fooled me,’ I riposted. ‘I thought television, the computer and the internet were part of one’s way of life.’
    â€˜What’s the internet?’ he asked blankly.
    â€˜How does anyone get a job if they can’t use a computer?’
    â€˜I don’t know what a computer is,’ he admitted candidly,’ but everyone’s fully employed here.’
    I stared at him in surprise. There’s eleven hundred people living here which means that about three hundred-and-fifty men and they same number of women have to be employed. I see no industry here. How’s it done?’
    â€˜You’d be surprised,’ he countered. ‘There’s farming, milking, cheese-making, plant and vegetable growing, gardening, weaving, carpentry, pottery, and many other