IT IS that wonderful time of the year again, the time of mist, mellow fruitfulness, and, best of all, peace and quiet. A blanket of silence hangs over the Dale and we can all breath again the air as it used to be before the cars and the coaches came in droves.

Apart from a few brave walkers, the trippers have gone. The tattoo tribe will not be seen again until next year, most of the weekenders won't be here again until Christmas, and the last of the Bats went off to their colleges a week or so ago.

The Bats, older readers might remember, are the young of the weekenders, who hang upside down all day and only come out at night, to create havoc with their car stereos or the crash of broken beer bottles against the dry-stone walls.

In some ways, it is a bit eerie. One almost expects a few balls of drift weed to roll down The Lane, as they did in the old Westerns before the baddies turned up to kill the sheriff.

We even have a moratorium in the Beggars' Arms: all talk of politics is banned for a month, a rule brought in by the Innkeeper after some of the more rancorous disputes over the D*m*, the N*t**n*l L*tt**y, and the p*t**l crisis.

Quite frankly, we're all bored with news of the great outside world and all we want to do is settle into our annual winter huddle and hibernate until lambing. Not that village life is a bore, that is.

We had something of an alarum last weekend when the Quiet Couple from Coney Cottage invited Teachers Tim and Tess to supper to feast on the mushrooms and wild fungi they had collected in Coney Wood, a hobby suggested by a nice coloured book of such things that her folks had sent them from deepest Henley-on-Thames.

With it was home-made elderberry flower champagne and goat's milk cheese that the Quiet Couple make from their small (and now tightly fenced) flock, plus an apple and damson tart from the remains of what used to be Coney Cottage orchard.

There is some dispute as to who fell ill first but the Doc got a call at about 9.30 and, by that time, all four were vomiting. He shipped them off by ambulance to the district hospital where they were all stomach pumped and kept overnight. Fort-unately, the toadstools they had consumed were only strong purgatives, not outright poison.

Doc, his Saturday night ruined, called in at the Beggars' for a swift gill, much to our surprise. And alarm, for the Doc has been threatening to quit. Funnily enough, he seemed to be in a great mood.

He could not, of course, reveal the reason his call out - professional secrecy forbade that - but he did come out with one remark, obscure at the time but now crystal clear with hindsight: "Why do city folk think they can learn country ways from books?"

*The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.