Looking down towards the post office now, I can see there is quite a queue outside. Swardesley, as ever, handles it coolly, cracking jokes, enquiring about the health of spouses and children and grandchildren and grandparents and parents, showing an uncanny recall for first names. ‘SIT!’ a woman yells at a Japanese Akita outside the door, sending a tremor through the waiting line. ‘I think the whole village just sat down,’ Swardesley wisecracks to Ruth Cole, who is waiting for a receipt for some handmade notebooks she just sent to Greece. Next up is Pat Gutteridge, who is here to collect her pension. Swardesley doesn’t try her with a joke, as he knows from experience she’s not one to stop for a chat. After this, in the stonewash jeans she is known for, she will purchase the two items she always purchases during her weekly shop, some vodka for herself and some sausages for the crows in her garden, plus some other provisions. She lives four miles from the village and always walks home, usually via Combe Woods. Last night a tree came down, entirely blocking the footpath, but today on both journeys she climbs the adjacent bank and vaults the trunk, in a manner reminiscent of a lanky nineteen-year-old boy. Next week, she will be seventy-one, an occasion she will celebrate alone by baking herself some cream cheese pound cake and watching a VHS of the film The Full Monty. People look at Pat and what they see is loneliness, countryness, a bony facade the world can’t get past. But in her youth Pat engaged for several years in what those same people might describe as living. She resided in London, danced on tables, took cherubic musician boys home with her and told them what to do. Nobody would ever know now, apart from herself, but in a documentary about the touring life of the folk supergroup Equinox, she can be seen in a post-gig gathering in a hotel room, smoking and laughing, exuding Gaelic beatnik chic with her sharp cheekbones, black turtleneck and fringe. For an eighteen-month period, but no longer than that, people sometimes mistook her for the folk singer Anne Briggs. To her left in the hotel room sits the singer Donovan Leitch, whose advances, earlier in the night, Pat had batted away.