The shift key [antikvár]

Victor Draycock awoke to the taste of excitement.Last night he had been restless. Despite the swirl of autumn mist that filled the valley of the River Chap, he had had to take a midnight walk in order to unwind. Later, though, in sleep, it seemed his subconscious had been working overtime. He had figured out precisely how best to phrase an article he had been planning for the past two months, publication of which in the Chapminster Chronicle had been as good as promised.In the village of Weyharrow Goodsir, where he lived with his wife Carol and their six-year-old son Tommy, a dispute was raging about the two kinds of visitors it attracted, es-pecially during the summer. There were prosperous tourists lured by its picturesque site and handsome stone buildings; they met with the grudging approval of the local gentry because they did nothing more disruptive than take photo-graphs, uttered properly admiring comments, and lunched or dined expensively at the Bridge Hotel, whose landlord was chairman of the parish council. Then there were the others, mostly under thirty, mostly shabby, drawn here for entirely different reasons, who were more likely to sit shirtless and barefoot on the car-park wall of the pub across the road. They met with no approval at all from the gentry, though somé from the young folk of the village, to whom they constituted a welcome diversion in a generally boring existence - and likewise from Victor, who prided himself on siding with the younger generation and had made himself immensely un-popular with the officious ladies of the Weyharrow Society by referring to the second type of visitors as 'pilgrims'.His article was intended to dot the said ladies one in theI