An English village
In Broughton you turn rightward along a lane into Milton Keynes, as fine a small English village as you are likely to encounter in these parts, or, for that matter, in any other parts.

Milton Keynes is a homely place. Fields encroach upon the dusty by-lane, and brim over the scattered cottages. There is nothing here of the conventional beauty spot, for indeed no one seems to have heard of the place, save the handful of its inhabitants; and these think so well of it that they rarely leave it, and then only upon compulsion like Falstaff.

I have known and loved Milton Keynes since I was a boy, but at no time in my legion pilgrimages thither have I met a stranger.

J. H. B. Peel Buckinghamshire Footpaths (1949)

The holy man of Wolverhampton
On the central reservation of Wolverhampton's ring road sits a khaki tent with a pair of torn socks drying on a stick outside.

Every morning an old man crawls out holding a broom and begins sweeping the kerb which separates him from the passing juggernauts. His matted beard ruffles in the wake of fast cars.

Josef Stawinoga, 83, a second world war veteran from Poland, has been living in a tent on the grass island for 40 years.

Traumatised by war, he has a phobia of confined spaces. The ring road is the only place he feels secure. He believes the second world war is still being fought and fears strangers are out to harm him. He wanders the reservation, hoarding any litter he finds.

Refusing to answer to Josef, Mr Stawinoga is known as Fred and he has become an institution in the Midlands.

Some of Wolverhampton's Asians revere him as a holy man who has shunned all worldly possessions. Several regularly pay their respects. Every morning for the past 13 years, a Sikh woman has travelled six miles to leave a flask of hot tea and a sandwich outside the tent. Another Indian woman appeared one afternoon asking the hermit to pray for her family, who had vetoed her choice of husband.

Angelique Chrisafis Guardian 16 April 2003

The denial of resilience
Today we find it difficult to accept the fact that youngsters possess a formidable capacity for resilience. Paranoid parenting is continually fulled by the belief that unless adults continually protect their infants, they will become damaged beyond repair.

Hilary Clinton's folksy book on child-rearing, It Takes a Village, begins with the sentence "Children are not rugged individualists." This statement on contemporary childhood - backed up by citations from well-known fashionable child experts - elevates vulnerability as its defining condition.

The key concept through which this sense of vulnerability is given definition is that of children at risk. "Children at risk" is an expression that we think we understand intuitively even though it is rarely defined. When reporters allude to a child at risk we rarely ask the obvious question, "at risk of what?" Just being "at risk" is sufficient to evoke a sense of pemanent danger.

We don't ask the question "at risk of what?" because we already suspect that the reply would be "at risk of everything".

Frank Furedi Paranoid Parenting (2001)

Free Wild Edric
Though the Stiperstones stand as long as the world endures the doom of the land we love may be inevitable unless the descendants of the Saxons rise and throw off that remaining relic of the Norman Conquest: class privilege based on a superiority that is not of mental nor even physical powers, but merely built up from one generation to another on the continued assumption of usurped authority, particularly associated in the minds of ramblers with the private ownership of uncultivated land.

The day that the English - or Scots or Welsh - tramper can cross the moors of his native Britain without fear of impediment from game-preserving landowners or their hirelings, that day will the Devil be finally foiled and the spirit of Wild Edric be liberated for ever from its dungeon beneath the Stiperstones.

John Wood Quietest Under the Sun: Footways on Severnside Hills (1944)