THE HONKEYMOON CAFE

A local farmer decides to take a wife, but didn’t allow for what came with her.  He hits upon a plan to ensure who gets the farm when he’s gone will be those who deserve it. Our village, as you know, is little more than a hamlet but has many of the facilities afforded to small towns for which we have to thank the Blythe estate. Besides the estate we are surrounded by farmsteads some rented, others privately owned, some of which do well, others do no more than scrape a living. Of the latter some years ago, one such was Todber’s Farm, a farming family with a history going back a century or more. The story goes that Michael Todber’s wife died during the sixties and for several decades ran the farm singlehanded due his only son being killed in a motorcycle accident. At seventy-six he decided that he could no longer manage the farm on his own and decided to look for a wife. There being no eligible women to marry in the vicinity, even if they wanted to, he decided to advertise. He receiv...

Where did Milton find his ‘three pound coin’?  Was it ever legal tender? Who are the mysterious callers?  Could they have some thing to do with the coin?  How many more questions can there be? Milton Peacock, the retired solicitor who lives opposite the Old Mill in our village and found the body of Mark Musgrave, passed by one Tuesday morning while I was dead-heading some roses in my front garden. He said he had heard that I had been in the antiques business and asked if I knew anything about coins. I replied that I was no numismatist but the house clearances I handled usually resulted in some coinage, and I could give him a name and number of a specialist.  Two days later he called in to say that the person I had put him on to had been quite short with him to the point of rudeness. I apologised on his behalf and asked Milton what had evoked such a hostile response. He produced from his pocket a small felt bag, within that some cotton wadding out of which he revealed...

A box found in a junk shop brings things to life - literally! Martin had taken the same route to and from work since he had started there. Why was it therefore that on this particular evening he found himself on a street he didn’t recognise? He had been lost in thought and had stopped opposite a grubby looking shop selling what for the most part appeared to be junk some of which spilled out onto the narrow pavement. In the window central to his gaze amongst the chaos was a wooden box. It was the kind in which, he recalled from TV shows, family bibles used to be kept. Martin, or his wife, had no real interest in antiques, and no bibles, but there was something appealing about it. A bell tinkled over the door as Martin entered and waited for the proprietor to appear.  ‘Hello, anyone there?’ Martin called but there was no reply and no sound from beyond the furniture and bric-a-brac piled almost to the ceiling. A gap left between the items turned a corner a few metres away ...

A genius counterfeiter doesn’t like the credit an ‘amateur’ is getting he himself deserves.  There’s pride in some crafts even though they are illegal.  And what does pride come before . . . ? Almost every week there seems to be a new coin minted to celebrate a person’s life, a historic event or some obscure anniversary. It may just be to give the designers something to do, the numismatists something to collect, or the forgers another challenge. Paul, who runs our village shop, due to his handling of change on a daily basis has a list of coins in circulation some of which are worth in excess of a thousand pounds. As a person steeped in antiques I find it unbelievable that a coin produced so recently could be worth far in excess of its face value, but Paul tells me it’s due mainly to minting errors, and rarity. As I was picking up my paper one morning, and being the only customer at the time, he called me to one side, ‘There,’ he said, ‘what do you think of that?’ So saying...