Empires...

Empires come and go. They expand and contract. This is true and it is empirically provable (or disprovable, if you prefer).

Places, on the other hand, are static. They remain in one place. If one ignores the movements of the earth, then they do not move at all. A place remains the unchanged. Things located there may change. If one encountered a building once, and returned to the same place in a thousand years time (if such a thing were possible), then one would find the same building, if it were robust enough. More likely, one would find it's ruins or only traces in the ground.

If a place stands near the boundary of two empires, then over time it is likely to be part of both. Sometimes it will belong to one, and at other times it will belong to another. There will also be times when it sits in a no-man's land between the two.

Like the tide ebbing and flowing, the empires will reach out and engulf a place and then recede and abandon it. History has a rhythm, like that of the tides. Not driven by our sister the moon, but by more distant bodies; the stars themselves, moving in their paths.

Novomosty is a place which has been subject to least two empires. As political allegiances and languages have changed then so has its name. The name may have changed, but the place has remained remarkable constant over the last century. It is, to use the common vernacular "a hole". Some people would call it something worse, by adding an adjective. They would be right. There is little to recommend Novomosty, except perhaps one thing and that only matters to someone like me.

At one time Novomosty (it went by a different name then) was a bustling frontier town, made rich and unsafe by trade and its proximity to the border. But fashions and borders and the goods which people want to buy and sell changed and the merchants and their money went elsewhere. Almost everyone who could leave, left, and what they left behind was a sparsely populated place, inhabited by ghosts, some alive and some dead.

Yes, Novomosty is a hole, and I call it home.
  

RE: The mad old bat, her one eyed son, Mable the pig and Gertie the goat

M, There isn't that much of a tale, but I'll tell you what there is. The cottage was called "Fox Meadow". At least that's what it was called in the brochure. Sometimes they use made up "cute" names in brochures so it might really be called anything. It's somewhere near Torrington, in Devon. It was one of the earlier summer holidays after N and the girls moved over to Ireland. I've just spent a fruitless couple of minutes with Google maps, hoping I would recognise some place names, but no joy.

I remember that we all met up at J's in mid-Wales and then I drove to Devon. Went over the old Severn Bridge, and turned right along the M5 through Avonmouth. Not a route I'd taken before, because it's just not the way I would travel to the west country, especially if I was starting from London. I remember that we paused somewhere for ice-cream. That delayed us.

Finding the cottage was a little bit of a struggle. It wasn't near anywhere much and was tucked about half-a-mile up/down a lane which turned into a bridleway. Effectively it was the end of a very long cul-de-sac. The building was, or had been, a row of cottages, with what might have been a cottage or might have been a barn at one end. We had the "barn" bit and "the bat" and her son had the rest. It looked like two or three cottages, but had actually been converted into one dwelling.

Anyway, "the bat's" name was Mrs Cameron and the son's name was Fergus. Must be some Scottish connection there somewhere. We turned up and they showed us the cottage (more of that later) and invited us to drinks. Drinks were in a sort-of communal garden which stretched along the whole of the front of the building. The whole set-up was very pleasant.

Our cottage was on two floors. Mrs C would have been in her eighties. Fergus wasn't around when we first turned up and I noticed that Mrs C didn't show us upstairs. She just indicated the stairs. I don't blame her at all. The stairs were the kind that only just qualify as stairs, rather than ladder and I had to duck near the top because of the slope of the roof. The cottage was stone and cob with a thatched roof. The first floor was really part in the roof and the windows were all very small. On the ground floor there was a sitting room and a kitchen with a stone-flagged floor. Simple but adequate. I remember that the bathroom was a bit primitive, but then what do you expect in a place like that. Everything worked. Upstairs the floor was uneven and the ceiling was low. There must have been an attic above the ceiling.

The garden was at the front of the building and the back of the building was almost blind. The only window was from the bathroom. Close by on that side there was a large pond which went along the full length of the building. We gave Siobhan and Margaret strict instructions that they were to go nowhere near the pond unless they were with Mummy, Daddy or Fergus. They didn't. They were much more interested in the other side.

So much for the building, now for the inhabitants. I got the idea that Mrs C some money. Probably from a deceased Mr C. She had some idea of being an artist. I saw some of her paintings and also went to an exhibition in Bideford where they were showing one or two that she had produced (among a hundred others!). The paintings were alright but unremarkable. The kind of landscapes that little old ladies paint. She really was daft as a brush. Fergus was, or had been, a professional  photographer and I got the impression that he didn't really want to be there. I think something had gone wrong somewhere else and that he had escaped to live with Mother. He did all the maintenance around the place. Fergus would have been in his late 50's or 60's, and as I said had only one eye.

Mrs C and Fergus seemed to be running a very small small-holding as well. Or maybe they just liked keeping pet animals. They had Mable the sow, a goat and a whole load of free range chickens. Siobhan and Margaret loved the animals. Mable's name really was Mable. Siobhan and Margaret decided that the goat must be called Gertie, so Gertie it remains. Mable was enormous and black and very friendly. She would snuffle at the fence if you stood there. Gertie as a great favourite. Siobhan and Margaret used to pull leaves (mostly docks) and Gertie was happy to take them, which of course delighted Siobhan an Margaret. Have you ever looked in a goat's (or sheep's) eyes? Most peculiar. They have sort-of dumb-bell shaped pupils! The hens used to just wander around the place and if we left the door open would sometimes come into the kitchen and have to be shooed out again.

It was really a very nice place to holiday with small children. Quite reasonable to let them wander around at the front on their own.

The nearest pub was a fair walk for me. I remember I located it with an Ordinance Survey map and it was a mile-ish footpath all the way, mostly through woods. Safe enough, but a bit of a challenge on the way home.

One little detail that I've just remembered was that Fergus told me that there was an attic that ran the whole length of the building and that he had to go up there on crawling boards for some reason.

Anyway, that's it. Not axe-wielding or screaming madness. Just a couple of eccentric people living in rather a nice place.

I enjoyed writing it anyway.

Cheers,

T