The Green Lane to Nowhere

When Byron Rogers moved to the village of Blakesley in the heart of Northamptonshire, quitting the city for the country was still a comparatively rare move - nowadays it is everyone's dream. Over the years his "Village Voice" column in the Daily Telegraph has observed his village's gradual evolution from a place where people lived from birth unto death, working in the surrounding fields, to a dormitory haven for car-borne commuters. Now, as his many weekly readers requested, his humorous chronicle of an English village appears in book form, the sequel to his previous collection, "An Audience with an Elephant". Here, then, is the Methodist chapel that became a car showroom, the village's charabanc outing to the seaside, the strange story of the ancient church in the fields, the summer fete at which the author bought his neighbour's shirts, his elevation to heady civic responsibility as Warden of the Paths, and the pathos of the commemoration of life lived amidst the most English of landscapes, the book should appeal to anyone who even dreams of leaving the metropolis behind.