Sometimes Ambridge reminds me of The Village, that splendidly implausible M Night Shyamalan film about a 19th-century community in Pennsylvania. The village’s secret is that beyond a supposedly monster-infested forest, there is an actual 21st-century world with cars and telly. But hardly anyone knows about it and no one dares go there. In fact the entire village has been set up as a mad kind of social experiment.
So it is in Borsetshire. The “powerful hold Ambridge can have” over its inhabitants was the subject of rumination by young Phoebe this month. (Will the penny drop? Will she realise that Nottingham, Birmingham, and even, dammit, London are places rather than idle dreams? Will she remember that she too once tasted freedom, at Oxford?)
