Our Village - Living with Ambiguity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a smallish village in Oxfordshire that I regularly pass through which I find absolutely fascinating. It’s a village that seems to have an identity problem, in that it can’t settle on how its name should be spelt. This literary crisis is tied up with its last three letters. Should it be ‘ton’ or ‘don’? I said I was a ‘passer through’, so I see the road sign at one end of the village is spelt with a ‘ton’ and at the other boundary, it appears with a ‘don’ at the end. This has been a continual mystery to me as the alternatives, if pronounced à la BBC, sound completely different. I guess a gloriously heavy Oxfordshire accent would minimise the difference, but even so!
Undeterred, I made for what I assumed to be the oldest building the village, the parish church. A quick scout round the porch notice boards left me none the wiser. There was more hedging on the issue than a fund manager could shake a stick at. Both variants competed with each other on paper and other permanently engraved notices. So not much consensus on the ground, maybe Wikipedia could help? Indirectly it did, I was directed to a village site which addressed the question; ‘Don or Ton?’. This (official?) authoritative source declares for ‘don’. But it’s at this point the plot thickens. In times past the village has had the suffix ‘ham’ and even ‘hampton’. Perhaps best they dropped the ‘hampton’, the road signs are not that wide.
So how does the village live with this ambiguity? Are there ‘dons’ and ‘tons’ on the march alternate weekends protesting outside the parish clerk’s house with sharpened pitchforks? Are there Facebook groups set up by the landed gentry roundabouts, advocating the return of the ‘hampton’? Well of course not, the village seems far too sensible for this and pragmatically opt to call the village by a nickname using the first five letters that all seem agreed on. Appropriately, so I’m told, this abbreviation translates as ‘Our Village’.
Living with this potentially polarising problem for presumably many hundreds of years, the rest of us have something to learn from this small Oxfordshire village. 
I do hope and pray that we can come to terms with the division that Brexit is currently visiting on us in the United Kingdom. Whatever the outcome; Brexit, Brino, Deal, No Deal, Remain etc. etc. at the end of the process, we will have a community split on a basic belief about the society in which they live. Living with this ambiguity is going to be a massive challenge.
To arrive at a pragmatic solution for our wider village, perhaps we need to ask the residents of ‘Bletch’ how they’ve done it without resorting to regular pitchfork protests.
©Keith Murphy