The last ferry of the day across the Merrow will keep running until at least next summer, after the council voted by twenty-two to twenty against cutting it. The crossing carries about ninety passengers a night, most of them hospital and hotel staff.

Nobody on the Kestrel estate remembers who planted the pear trees, because nobody did. They were nursery stock, left in the ground when the Hollins nursery closed in 1987 and the land was forgotten. The trees grew anyway. For years their fruit fell and rotted in the long grass. Then, four autumns ago, a retired teacher called Win Abbott put…