Danskcolin: Saturday July 24th 2026 "Is YOUR community going rapidly downhill, in a not very smart car, to put it mildly!!!"

Yes, Friends, are you concerned that YOUR local community is deteriorating rapidly downhill with a lot of undesirable people in undesirable cars turning up and parking outside YOUR house?

It's been happening to a lot of us recently, but one local community seems to have found the answer, to judge from the story in today's Onion News - just turn to page 94!

Kudos, those residents! One just has to make a stand at some point, doesn't one!

And reading those plucky residents' story this morning, here in semi-respectable Liphook, Hampshire brings a tearful smile to the faces of me and my wife Lois, to put it mildly!

me and my wife Lois - a recent picture

Community is still important, even in 2026, Lois and I believe, and community theatre even more so! Hence our committed drive to support the local "amdram" (amateur dramatics to the uninitiated!), except when we can't be bothered to get out of bed for it, that is! Last Saturday afternoon we weren't quite in the mood for a bunch of local actors acting their hearts out in front of our noses, and so we casually switched our booking to today instead.

While being crusty old "boomers", we're also quite "wizard", as young people might say today, at pressing buttons on our own, and each other's, phones, so don't talk to us about "Gen Z" phone-users casually carrying their phones, plus keys, money etc in one of their enormous so-called "claws" haha!

And this Saturday afternoon, casually as anything, we also move our "statutory nap-time" forward to 12:30pm, so we can do it and still be in time to scoot round to nearby Headley Village Hall for 2pm, to catch the penultimate performance of "Flora's Heatherley", a local play celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of local authoress Flora Thompson (1876-1947).

Flora Thompson was the postmistress at nearby Grayshott, who wrote the classic autobiographical novel "Lark Rise to Candleford", which you may remember was a big hit on BBC TV a few years ago.

And the afternoon certainly turns out to be lots of fun for Lois and me, and for the 40-strong audience in Headley Village Hall, as the local theatre group brings to life young Flora's struggles to find the time, in between her busy working days at the Post Office, to do her writing; while, at the same time, her having to fend off would-be suitors, would you believe, and also having to silence all the local gossips, curious to know when she was going to find a husband, and all that sort of "malarkey"!

The production, by local writer John Owen Smith, evocatively brings back the atmosphere of those crazy, far-off, times - the birth of new ideas like socialism, and also the Boer War which took so many of the local lads away to far-off South Africa to fight the Boers.

Above all the writer does a great job bringing to life Flora's extraordinary determination to become an author, undaunted by the reputations of the already famous writers living in this area, people like George Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle, who used to pop into Flora's post office to buy stamps and collect telegrams etc - what madness, wasn't it !!!

(left) George Bernard Shaw and (right) Arthur Conan Doyle,

two of the writers living in this area in the late 19th century

At the end of the afternoon's performance, the cast persuade selected members of the mostly elderly audience sitting around the sides of this local village hall to get up and be their partners a traditional so-called "circle dance", to close the afternoon's fun, which is a nice touch!

For some reason, none of the cast picked either Lois or me to be their partners - a big relief to Yours Truly, but I suspect Lois has always had an unfulfilled yen to "trip the light fantastic", either with GBS or with the creator of Sherlock Holmes, so I try to be extra nice to her to make up for it, for the rest of the day - I'm all heart haha!!!