For many years, the first sign of life you’d see when you came down that funnel in Joyce’s painting was an old blacksmith’s cottage, but that fell into disrepair several decades ago, the more interesting parts of its structure gradually appropriated by passing opportunists in or around the building trade. The road bends sharply just at this point, with no warning, and once every couple of years you’ll see a mangled, abandoned bike, formerly owned by someone who got carried away with the gradient and didn’t quite judge the turn. The blacksmith’s cottage was replaced during the 1970s by the Molesting Station. Despite society’s disapproving eyes and the nature of its purpose being far less fashionable than it was during its outset, the Molesting Station isn’t shy about telling you what it is. It even announces it publicly. ‘MOLESTING STATION’ it says in big letters, on the front of the building. OK, I’m not giving you all the facts here. It’s actually a garage, owned by Phil Spring, who took it over when his father Brian Spring retired in 2013, and it in fact has ‘MOT TESTING STATION’ written outside. But as you approach from the north, the split trunk of a beech tree on the side of the road obscures the first ‘T’ and the roof of the second one, so it appears to say ‘MOLESTING STATION’. I’m surprised more people don’t comment on it. Whatever the case, the garage does good business, at competitive prices, and has a reputation for honesty. After Phil realised he overcharged Paul Pike recently for replacement brake pads and discs, when in fact his apprentice Alun had only replaced the discs, not the pads, he called Paul immediately and did a bank transfer for the difference plus a gesture of goodwill, which he suggested at ten pounds. ‘Call it twelve?’ said Paul. ‘OK,’ said Phil. I don’t have a car for reasons that will in time become clear, but if I did I would definitely take it here, instead of one of those supergarages, where you not only pay for your repairs but for the flatscreen TV in the foyer and the machine next to it that pisses out bad coffee you drink purely because you’re there and not sure what else to do with your hands, and the pointless little matching blazers of the employees milling all around you doing you’re not sure what. Beyond the Molesting Station is what is, for now, the village’s most northerly residential frontier: twenty-five hugely unimaginative terraces built in the 1990s, once going under the preposterous collective title of Otter’s Holt, a name now blessedly forgotten, apart from, evidently, by me. I dislike these houses but I like all but two of the families who currently live in them, which softens the architectural anguish a little.