This has been sat in my drafts for some time but I never got around to posting it.

A while ago, for reasons that I completely fail to remember now, I had cause to Google Belthorn. Now, to give you some background, Belthorn is your fairly typical Lancashire village. It’s small, both geographically and in terms of population, and it’s pretty remote. It sits on the top of a hill overlooking the Oswaldtwistle Moors and, in winter, is the first place to get snowed on. As I recall the commercial centre of the village consists of a Pub, a Post Office and, at one time, a Drum Shop. That should tell you all you need to know about small hilly Lancashire villages.

anyway. I had reason to Google Belthorn, and so I did. It just so happened that I was at home and so had SafeSearch turned off (I’ve had far too many bad experiences with this to have it turned off at work, thank you very much).

There was a long list of links but nothing terribly relevant. Then something rather took me by surprise. The fifth link down the Google list, just under a link to a BBC News report on Belthorn Primary School’s statistics¹, was a link entitled "Belthorn swingers adult contacts at Genuine UK Swingers."

I wasn’t mistaken. It wasn’t a link for an dance group website for grown-ups.

So that, dear readers, taught me something else about small, hilly, windy, weather-beaten villages that I just had to share: there’s so little to do and so much weather that they like to pass the time by having sex with everyone else in the village. A lot.

Make of that what you will but just bear it in mind the next time someone from a small isolated village asks you to go camping with him and his wife.

Just a thought.

¹ A very good school, by the way. My Mum taught there and my Dad was one of the governors