Global Warning | 17 May 2008

I realised that the town was a true community as soon as I heard a rumour that an old lady, a herbalist, had poisoned one of her neighbours. That is what community means: caring enough to poison people. In cities, contact with neighbours is so fleeting and impersonal that antagonism can be expressed only with baseball bats, a crude method requiring little cunning. If Marx were alive today, he would speak of the idiocy of urban life.

In a small town, the rest of the world hardly exists. One soon finds what happens there to be more interesting than what happens in the wide world beyond. For example, banks were crashing, shares were going up and down like lifts in a department store, the world was on the edge of a financial abyss (to speak metaphorically), but what really interested me was the flight the night before of the local publican.