VIEWING the seven shelves of books I retain after re-homing more than 1,000 books as part of the great down-sizing exercise I can see how much the written word has influenced the way I see the world.

EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful; A study of Economics As If People Mattered, is prime among the books I still cherish and draw wisdom from.

He espouses smaller working units, communal ownership and utilising local labour and resources; he challenges the all-powerful philosophy that is being applied to almost everything that we do; the all-pervading test ‘is this the cheapest and does it make the biggest profit’; the watchwords of the giant, soulless globalised organisations.

We count ourselves blessed living in Small is Beautiful Ludlow with its harmonious streets and buildings set against the backdrop of glorious countryside , its small local businesses, its good food and restaurants, its lively arts scene and its sense of community, all of which allow us to escape the worst of the inhumane society which follows the drive for making money at all costs.

We need to cherish our town, to protect it from rampant development but without setting it in aspic.

This rumination led me to me thinking, how many of us Ludlow residents are ‘asylum seekers’, what percentage of us were not born here but sought refuge here?

As asylum seekers did we discover that the old Ludlovians had constructed barriers along the A49? The incoming population has made considerable change to the town that was Ludlow and that change has made alteration to the way of life of the longstanding families, some, but not all of it, good, witness how hard it is for the children of those families to find affordable homes.

The asylum seekers who crowd the Calais area and who risk even their lives for a chance to escape the mayhem that their homelands have become ask the longstanding residents of the UK to give them refuge.

They will bring change to our society, possibly not all of it good, they will, make demands of us much as the incomers have made demands on the indigenous population of Ludlow and they will expect to be accepted as we expected when we came to live here.

To steal a Biblical quote ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’.