At my grandparents’, a number of the burnished came to make calls on the telephone, and enquired after me, and repeated versions of what they heard had happened, adding details and leaving out others in a living demonstration of how reality was made up. It was a true thing that all incidents in the parish then had an afterlife and were tirelessly reanimated with an interpretative emphasis or edit. It was one of the threads that tied community and whether or not you had heard the story already didn’t matter, you listened to this version and nodded and said, ‘I know,’ and let that knowledge be a
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