​The church clock marked the hour with silence in the village of Chelmonden.  Harold frowned as he thought of how the ‘incomers’ to the village had fought to get the bells silenced.  Once mechanised bells chimed every hour, ringers marked every occasion, every event in village life; now they were only permitted to ring out on rare occasions by an ever diminishing band of bell ringers.  Both the bells and the church were suffering from a diminishing state of repair, a diminishing congregation supplying diminishing funds that were required to keep an ageing institution alive.  Harold felt the application to himself.
 
Harold wandered past the old red telephone box, now decommissioned and revamped into a home for a defibrillator.  He thought of how once this box had been the beacon of hope for those with clandestine lovers, distanced friends or simply an emergency; in the days where you were lucky to have one phone in a house, let alone one in every pocket.  He sauntered past the pub, once the meeting point of the local shoot or hunt members gathering to talk over the day’s sport and farmers swapping notes on crops and cattle.  Now it was all family gatherings, meal deals and happy hours.
 
Harold entered the church yard and parked himself on the bench.   Until recently, the bench had been a bit like him, old, battered, a bit shabby but still serving a purpose.  However, he and his friends, the village old guard, had been voted off the parish council after years of unchanging service.  The new guard had since been busy renovating the village furniture and the bench was now a bright blue.  It seemed loud and brash in his mind, rather like the new lot that had been voted in.  He had sneaked out in the night and restored it to its former unpainted glory, but undeterred, they had painted it blue again.  The new council was nearly all women, voted in on a whole raft of new ideas and initiatives, bandying around words that Harold didn’t even understand like ‘diversity’, ‘sustainability’, ‘inclusion’.  They wanted things like a playground for the children (Harold thought they should be playing in the fields as he had), trees planting (he’d spent a lifetime clearing trees and hedges as a farm hand) and communal activities (Harold thought the church had provided these but no one seemed to go there anymore). Harold thought about the village women through his lifetime; they stayed at home looking after house, husband and children; the nearest they got to political opinion was attending the WI meetings and they hadn’t seemed unhappy in his mind.  He couldn’t understand this modern lot, running round the village with their paintbrushes and posters in hand, trying to galvanise everyone into taking action on whatever cause they were currently championing.  He wondered what his Betty thought of them, but her opinion remained buried with her in the grave near his feet.
 
The old guard had tried to fight against the new lot, they had argued that the election hadn’t been fair and so the new lot had no legal standing. They had tried to point out how the new lot were profligate with the village funds, how they were changing the fabric of the village without discussion. It was all to no avail.  Another election had been held, but the votes went with the new lot in even greater numbers.  Harold felt that a definite line had been drawn between the two sides and he was on the losing team.
 
Harold wasn’t sure if he had any fight left in him now, the march of time seemed to be overtaking him and the village was changing rapidly.  Harold had lived here all his life, got married in the very church he was sat in front of; he’d seen changes of course during this time, but now it was as if the village was emerging as something new and different. The old order of things was breaking down and it seemed to Harold that the new order was one of chaos, noise and confusion.
 
The church clock silently marked the passing of another hour.  Harold remained on the bench, the bench that he would never again rise from under his own steam.  The baton of village life silently passed into the hands of the new guard.