Sarah Todd: Culture change in the countryside leaves locals feeling like strangers

Recently, he was waxing lyrical about going into a local shop and being able to buy stuffed olives and some sort of unpronounceable fancy cheese but not the basics like a loaf of bread, pint of milk or stamp.

There was somebody else in but they didn’t look up and say “hello”, just carried on as if they were in the aisles of one of the big supermarkets.

It was a shop he’d been popping into since he was a boy, but here he was now an outsider in his own neighbourhood.

His musings have kept coming to mind. Robin’s feelings of becoming something of an endangered species, a square peg in an increasingly urbanised round hole, ring true. There must be an older generation who feel it even more intensely.

Our daughter, who is instinctively agricultural (she can spot a hole in a fence like an experienced old farmer) feels the same.

They are having a trip, a get-together with children the same age from another primary school.

“Will there be anybody like me?” eagerly asked the little person who dreams of being surrounded by classmates who are into the same things.

When we were young, there were plenty of other farmery lads for my brother to lark about with. All the girls were animal crackers.

We’ve a number to ring for the young farmers’ club, so, hopefully, this might fill the void. Sadly though, the club we did have in mind isn’t meeting any more because of a lack of numbers.

Perhaps this community’s ratio of stuffed olive and fancy cheese eaters has risen above the threshold for maintaining a young farmers’ club?

One place she did feel at home was last weekend’s Bramham Horse Trials.

With seven year-old little brother in tow, she went around with no grown-ups for hours at a time, collecting autographs and buying bits and bobs with the egg money.

They reappeared with tales to tell of meeting Yorkshire riders John Whitaker and Oliver Townend.

Whether we’ll let them go off on their own at next month’s Great Yorkshire Show remains to be seen. It’s so much bigger and busier that people would, surely, frown upon it.

It is good though, for children to be allowed to be a bit free range. Money still burns a hole in our youngest’s pocket, but he at least returned home with some change.

Don’t worry, we spent it on pork pie – not stuffed olives.