'has taken on an idealised and stereotyped form, consisting mainly of images of thatched cottages with roses round the door, the sun always shining, birds trilling in the treetops, and everyone happy and healthy.

But of course it very often wasn't like that at all.

The thatched cottages were usually intolerable slums when the poor inhabited them, and were only made liveable when the rich discovered the charm of a simple rustic habitation as an escape from the industrial urban environment.<<<<



Cleanliness is next to Godliness, was the rule that many people lived by in those days. The poor, not having much, had their pride. And many of them would not have dreamed of letting their cottages stay dirty and smelly. Women worked hard to keep clothes, houses clean. They baked their bread together, did their washing together...There was a far greater sense of community and love abounding in the cottages of yesteryear, for all their damp and coldness on a winter's day, than there is in the so often sterile villages that now abound, where the peasants thatched cottages now are cold for different reasons.

They may have had nothing, but they had God and they had each other.
Life was lived to a different set of standars, close to nautre. Simple pleasures gave much joy.

Now, their cottages stand empty for much of the year, being used as holiday homes, or second homes...or they are filled with materialistic treasures belonging to people who have no spirituality in their souls and who do all they can to stop the church bells from waking them too early or the cock from crowing.....

I will have my England of the Past, for the Present has lost so very many of its Treasures.....

The England of the Future depends on the New Peasants rising from the worst recession in history and once again learning to fill their cottages with the sound of laughter and love, even if they are no longer able to afford their central heating or fashionable clothes...


The new Rich of England will be for those who once again hear the beautiful music in the winding babbling brooks, who have time to sit and watch the birds flying from tree to tree, who come to know the seasons again, the fruits, the vegetables, their growing times, who notice the beauty in the blossom, and the richness of a sunset....

England, my England.......