Our pub was supposed to open next week, but today the government announced a delay in the return to indoor dining and drinking, due to the increasingly rapid spread of the Delta variant, so the earliest we may open is late July. We are quite relieved. I’d rather wait until all the people in their twenties and thirties were vaccinated.

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Up the street the back of an abandoned house caught on fire, and the whole road was blocked with what seemed every fire brigade within the county. Very likely teenagers, smoking cigarettes. If not for their wild and often intemperate ways, teenagers would make excellent spies, rooting out the secrets of a small place the way they do.

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