There are many quirks of fate in Unstone’s history. One being that for such an ancient village – (mentioned twice in the Domesday survey of 1086 and with a Jacobean Manor), it has a 20th Century church. Another is that we have a Church Street but the church of St Mary is and always was from its outset very firmly situated on Crow Lane. It is such a shame that St Mary’s wasn’t built with its proposed tower. Maybe if it had been, Crow Lane would have been renamed Church Street.
Don’t forget to visit Unstone Post Office, and get your copy of ‘On the Doorstep and Beyond the Gate’, in time for Christmas. For every copy sold £1 is being donated to Ron Gains’ chosen charity, the Neurovascular Fund.
How many of you reading this blog found history a dull subject in school? Was it that teachers were ‘non-inspirational’, or topics studied were totally boring and had little relevance to the ‘here and now’ of teenage life?
I have to admit that history was way down the list of my favourite subjects, though not as bad as learning a foreign language when I had little idea where France was.
Yet, today I write history books. I have a desire to make history interesting, meaningful and tangible. Is it an age thing to find that I suddenly start to feel sorry for the dilapidated state of the K6 telephone box and ask the Parish Council to adopt it for £1? Then I realise all I did by this action was to shift the liability and the K6 falls into a state of more dilapidation without even a use for those who may have forgotten their two plus mobiles, have broken down and need to call out the fourth emergency service.
But whatever the state of Unstone’s K6, the once iconic symbol of ‘Britishism’, it has become the main character in my Old Red Box series of books for children. You never know, a few of those kids out there might start to notice these diminishing red boxes and wonder what they were for.
