STENTON SURPRISE

The little black spaniel and I set out in the car on a surprisingly pleasant and mild October morning.  We were bound for Stenton, a small village in a small county in a small country. It’s a twenty-minute drive from Haddington, along leafy lanes showing gold and red amongst the trees.  It has a handsome sandstone church, and a number of well-mannered houses.  It has an ancient doocot, with pigeons being the main source of meat in winter for the citizens who were then deprived of smartphones and oven-ready chickens.  There is still the mercat cross, a reminder of times when livestock was brought to the village and auctioned, a sort of ‘Antiques Road Trip’ with flesh. Our purpose was a little more prosaic.  We were there to see if the dog could figure out a way to extract a tennis ball from a goal net, which it hadn’t been able to do in the past.  Stenton has a play park, in which two small goals are placed so that a rudimentary game of football can be enjoyed by the tiny tots of the village.  Across one of the goals is strung a net, with a mesh fine enough to trap a tennis ball.  When I hit the ball into the net with an old tennis racquet I carry in the boot of the car, the dog invariably goes to the wrong side of the net, and ends up trying to pull the ball through it, whence it will not go.  Not once has she the common sense to come goalside of the ball, and pick it out the easy way.  She ends up almost pulling the net off the posts in her endeavours to get the ball. And so it proved this time, so, for the umpteenth time, I had to lift the net, shake it vigorously, and release the ball. She grabbed the ball with gratitude and shook her tail so much, she nearly took off, like a helicopter.  We had parked next to the village hall, an ancient building with incongruous solar panels in the slate roof, and we walked past it into the village proper.  There was no sign of the 1957 Standard Eight or the 1955 MG Magnette ZB in the major’s large garden, but the Citroen 2CV Dolly was still there, under a lean-to, quietly rotting away.  The pelargoniums were still blooming in Miss Trout’s border, a testament to the recent fine weather.  The churchyard was precisely as I had last seen it, full of graves.  I noted that Alderley Lodge was for sale, and made a mental note to check the website to see how old it is.  It’s one of those houses that are harled and painted pink, and the terra cotta tiled roof looks new, so it could have been built in 1860 or 1990.  A man was building a pergola in his garden.  ‘You’ve taken on a job there,’ I said. ‘Don’t I know it,’ he replied.  ‘Have you ever tried to drill through oak?’  I’d had some experience of drilling through chipboard, but I didn’t let on.  ‘How long will it take you?’ I asked.  He looked ruefully at a pile of timber lying on the ground.  ‘About a fortnight, the way things are going.’  I left him to it.  A fortnight isn’t long in Stenton time.  After all, there’s not that much to do there, apart from fishing tennis balls out of a goal net.