I went into the parish room today. Now this room is a funny place. I call it a room, it is rather a suit of rooms, a house even. For that is what it was built as. That was well over two centuries ago. It is built of red brick with soldier arches to the windows and stone mullions. When it was built, it was built as a farm house. For an hundred and fifty years it was someones home, then one day it noticed that it had had the farm stolen. What had been green fields, full of cows, other animals and corn ,but it was now growing a fine crop of other houses and new ones at that full of smart young men in the motor trade, and women who competed to produce the best coffee morning because they had little better to do. So the house looked out and wondered how long this new crop of houses would take to mature and be harvested so that the farmhouse could go back to what it was good at, being a farmhouse. So it waited and whilst it waited, the farmer moved out with his family and the farmhouse fell silent. And it waited for sometime and it began to dawn on the farmhouse that this crop of new houses was not a crop at all, but here to stay. So it wondered what it was to do for the rest of life. It did occur to the farmhouse that it might be the crop and that it was going to be move somewhere different. It was then that the house received a visitor. A priest, not just any pries, but the local Vicar. The house knew it was the Vicar because it had seen him before.
The before was at rogationtide when the farm had been used from time to time as a place to blest the next years crop. So the Vicar came, came with the Churchwardens, a surveyor and a builder who had his secretary in tow
The farm house did not like the the secretary. A rather stupid girl in high heels who talked in a high squeaky voice and had to ask for everything to be repeated.That made the house sorry for the the girl, it cannot be easy being deaf. Or so the farmhouse thought until it realised that she heard quite well when the builder asked, in a very quite voice, if she was going to stay in the certain hotel with him that night, as his wife was away for the week.
The house knew at that point that it was stupidity that needed everything repeated. It must be stupidity as the builder was one of the most ugly men she had ever seen. After the meeting, as the builder drove away in his Bentley, with the stupid girl, this house wonder what she saw in him to waste her youth and beauty on such a middle aged man.

to be continued