Medbourne still has a village shop

After I climbed the hill to Nevill Holt - regarded by most scholars as the inspiration for Bonkers Hall - I quoted something I wrote in Liberator to mark 20 years of Lord Bonkers:

As a teenager, armed with a water bottle and Ordnance Survey map, I cycled out to find Bonkers Hall many times, only to return defeated on every occasion.

I did cycle the countryside around Market Harborough when I was a teenager and am still haunted by the thought of what I must have seen and could have photographed.

But one thing is wrong in that quotation: I never took water with me in those days.

In part it was because I was slimmer and fitter, but it was also because I knew that when I arrived in a village of any size there would be a shop where I could buy a cold drink.

In the 40 years since then those shops have all closed.

But not quite all.

I was pleased to find that Medbourne still has a village shop. Better, though Medbourne is a village that attracts the wealthy, it is not full of artisan quinoa. It sells the everyday goods that village shops sold in the 1970s.