[meteeratymn]

How beautiful it must have been, Andreas. I love Agatha Christie and have read just about all her mysteries over and over. I would love to have lived in a small village like the one Miss Marple lived in. Aren't such villages to be found anywhere?

Effie Well, at first we lived on a main road in Rotherham, a northern industrial town. But I remember playing on the front lawn and stopping to look if a car went past! But later I lived in a small village near Sheffield. You can still find 'Miss Marple' villages in rural areas such as the more remote parts of East Anglia and in Hampshire and Dorset, and in North Yorkshire. The best re-creation of the 1950's is in the BBC Miss Marple series starring Joan Hickson. It's not really nostalgia for childhood on my part since, I'm sorry to say, I didn't enjoy childhood very much. But life without supermarkets, motorways, lots of electrical gadgets, foreign holidays, and without central heating and fitted carpets, washing machine, freezer, computers, DVDs, etc etc was simple and safe if rather harder. Now, we have information overload and get anxious about things we never used to because we didn't know. Daily life in a working-class home in Rotherham 55 years ago, say, would now be thought of as unheard-of austerity for even a monastic!