THE PLIGHT of the villages of West Dorset is fast becoming dire. The shops, Post Offices and pubs are closing like the rat traps in Hamelin before the arrival of the Pied Piper. Yet that is only the tip of a very worrying iceberg.

As well as these important ingredients of rural life an historical tradition that dates back to the centuries before any of these other facilities were even imagined is also being lost. I write, of course, of the lamentable dearth of idiots in our villages.

And what’s wrong now? I’ll tell you what, apart from everything: people on planes. I don’t mean other planes, as in planes of existence, because I’m more than happy for them to occupy whatever construct they’ve constructed for themselves. It wouldn’t do for them to be taking up space on my fluffy cloud. I mean aeroplanes, where it’s difficult to avoid rubbing shoulders with people you would normally rather send into orbit in a shoddy spaceship fashioned from biscuit tins.

Yes, it’s me again, back for another vicious grumble after a prolonged silence, a silence sadly not attributable to the sudden rightness of everything in our delightful town but due entirely to the feebleness of the puny string of internet cable/cotton that connects these far-flung parts to the outside world: it broke. Or something. I hear things work better in Sodom. It’s warmer, too, and easier to fix.

So anyway … what’s wrong now?