The Thing Is About To Happen

The Thing that I have been dreading is about to happen. There is a stretch of rolling countryside, running between the outskirts of my home town and the coast; punctuated by woodland, copses and coverts of oak, ash, beech, hornbeam and hazel: overhead, in high summer, the larks sing. Walking up through there, on a fine day, is about as good as it gets. But now developers are after it. The designations of 'Green Belt' seem to have no meaning any more and so, offering blandishments of 'services to the town', they will soon be sending the bulldozers in - a town where little happens, beyond the execution of the functions of the local authority and the activity in the supermarkets, which have stripped all the vitality out of its heart. Then it will all be gone and the uglification of that quiet corner will be complete.