Ms Brunhilda Barfoote

 

Brunhilda

HB pencils on cartridge paper

Brunhilda

Brunhilda is in her mid-thirties and built of competence.

During the week she works in the city, where she leads a department in a company large enough to require diagrams. She is involved in high-level strategy, the kind that determines direction rather than stationery. She does not file things. She decides things, significant things. The sort of decisions that ripple outward and cause entire teams to reconfigure themselves by Monday.

She wears business suits and court shoes that expect progress. Shoes that click with authority but lack imagination.

At weekends she returns to the village, where she has a house, a kettle that whistles decisively, and the freedom to dress as she pleases and be the person she really is; strategic but impulsively buys wild flowers, formidable but fond of the childhood pebble on her desk.

As far as clothing goes, she is a woman of two halves.

In the city: tailored, strategic, quietly formidable.
In the village: strangely gothic with big black boots.

She especially loves her boots because they have firm heels, clean lines, pointed toes and laces you can pull just tight enough. The leather bears the faint creases of use, not neglect. Movement has shaped it. Fun has shaped it. So has gravel, damp grass, uneven paving stones and at least one poorly stacked log pile (now corrected and categorised). This is not a boot that waits upright beside a copse, like Allesandro Porcinis. This is a boot that arrives, assesses, and proceeds.

The village is quietly thrilled to have her on the Parish Council. Meetings are swifter, and agendas remain on topic. Motions are proposed, clarified and concluded before anyone has time to mention badgers.

Brunhilda is a woman who rarely announces herself, and things simply seem to improve in her vicinity. She does not raise her voice. She does not need to, because she possesses the sort of intelligence and control that can untangle a funding application, rebalance a budget, reorganise a tool shed and still remember who prefers oat milk. On at least one occasion the Parish WhatsApp corrected its own spelling.

Her one known weakness is lemon drizzle cake. Not just a slice, but a whole cake situation. The village fete committee has noted this carefully and deployed it with restraint.

The village has, quietly and without recorded vote, come to rely on her.