Search Engines Report Haddenham Already Typing Santa

Haddenham has started typing the word Santa.

Not saying it. Nobody in this village would say it out loud in October, with the pumpkins still stacked by the door at Bloomin' Fruity and the green under a wet brown carpet that nobody has agreed whose job it is to move. Saying it would be mad. But the search box is private, or feels private, and somewhere between the school run and the bins a resident of Church End sat in a parked car with the engine off and typed six letters into a phone, then deleted them, then typed them again and pressed go.

They are all at it. A woman at the bakery queue admitted she had been looking at a grotto in Aylesbury "purely to see the lay of the land". A man on Churchway got as far as the word before his wife came into the room and he swerved into weather for Thursday. The phones know. The phones have known since about the fourth of the month, and the phones do not care that there are skeletons taped to the porch at number fourteen, where Halloween is observed the way other households observe a mortgage.

"I typed it at half ten at night with the lamp off," said one Stanbridge Road resident, who asked not to be named on the grounds that she still has to live here. "Then I cleared my history like a criminal. I am forty-six years old."

The leaves will be dealt with eventually, probably by rain. The costumes are in the bag by the stairs. And under all of it, humming away in a thousand pockets across this village, the quiet autocomplete of a people who have decided that ten weeks is near enough, that a man in a red coat is a reasonable thing to think about while the clocks are still wrong, and that none of us need ever tell each other.