Village Pond Declared A Roundabout By Satnav Firm

At twenty to nine on Tuesday morning, a silver estate car came down Church End, slowed at the pond, and went round it. Then it went round it again. By the fourth lap a man with a dog had stopped pretending not to watch, and there was nothing else to watch, because the pond currently contains no water and no ducks, only a dry grey dish combed into neat tyre arcs, as if someone had raked it for a garden nobody ordered.

A mapping company's latest update has reclassified Haddenham pond as a roundabout. Not a landmark, not a body of water, a roundabout, with a priority rule and an implied give way to vessels already on the gyratory. The screens in the cars say take the third exit. There are two exits and one of them is a wall.

By Wednesday there were six vehicles in the loop at once and a courteous rhythm had established itself, the way it does in this village when nobody wants to be the one to break the system. Drivers were indicating. Drivers were indicating at an absence.

Complicating matters, a production company has paid a sum described by one onlooker as roughly a small bungalow to fill the thing with water for filming. Nobody is renting it back out afterwards and nobody is coming to take the water away. It will simply evaporate, slowly, into the Buckinghamshire sky, which is the same thing the money has already done, only the money managed it faster. For a while Haddenham will have a pond, and then it will have a damp patch, and then it will have the hole again, and the hole will not apologise.

The parish council has discussed this, in the sense that it has been added to an agenda for a date in the future, which in Haddenham counts as decisive action. A letter is being drafted.

The Herald sent a reporter to observe, and he is still out there, and we have agreed not to make a thing of it. He says he intends to stay until the water arrives so that he can go round a pond that is briefly real. He says that on the straight bit, if you get the timing right, you can see the whole village go past like a thing you used to belong to. We have told him to come back after lunch.