fiefoe

The country and its people:

its bit of front garden sulking behind a rusting .. fence.
It was an off-the-peg job. Evidently there had been no medieval wool boom in these parts. This has been starveling country, every stone an extortion.
Even between the buttresses it had been beautifully cut with only a hint of mortar.
She had him weighed up and, right from the start, gave him no change.
That rose, Sara van Fleet... I still have it. Pressed in a book. My Bannister-Fletcher, as a matter of fact.
"I come in useful at baptisms, weddings, funerals. Chiefly funerals - they employ me as a removal contractor to see them safely flitted into their next house."
Mossop, remarking that us southerners were fair cautions,
"The commonality were launched in a shroud," he said. "Pure wool by Act of Parliament to bolster trade. But my man would rate a stone box." <> Then he climbed out (of the coffin), handed down a steel tape and had me call out measurements like a tailor's boy.

Are you here to try to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?
Our jobs are our private fantasies, our disguises, the cloak we can creep inside to hide.
Life had flooded back, tingling to my finger-tips.
Oxgodby's just about ironed you out.

"A Month in the Country" [.]