School's out

The wind is howling. Children leaving primary school for the very last time are howling.

Mrs Bancroft's hanging basket has come crashing down, along with the clematis on the wall. Posh Totty and MDF Man have got a fire going and it's still only six o'clock.

Crow Man has given up trying to change his flat tyre on his Land Rover Discovery outside my front door and called in reinforcements in the shape of the farmer who wears a deerstalker and long sideburns and sends tractors to the Third World.

The police have just paid a visit to the pub after another break-in. Not long after, the landlord's daughter arrives home from London after falling 20ft from a window on to concrete below and lives to tell the tale.

Ding Dong Daddy marches down the road for a swift pint as if keeping to the beat of an integral iPod playing jazz inside his polished head. The Union Jack outside the shop has wrapped itself around so many times it looks like a patriotic barber's pole.

Nobby Odd-Job drives by in his Range Rover, with its personalised number plate, and wearing a suit. The great trees on the village green bend and sway like the pictures you seen when the Caribbean has a hurricane.

Noel Edmonds plays mind games with Celebrity Farmer who sits beside his phone, waiting for the call that will tell him if he has made it on to Deal or No Deal. A blue plastic bag filled with dog crap lies on the edge of the field, the field that was recently the scene of a frank exchange of views among the silage between Celeb's dad and a stray dog walker.

A holidaymaking couple cross the square hand-in-hand. The brassy blonde woman looks old enough to be the man's mother. Four boys about to go into their second year of secondary school swagger by with bicycles and footballs, looking forward to September when they can boss the younger ones around. They snigger and quietly make rude remarks about a visiting family who go past them with a pushchair.

Silky volvar toadstools have sprung up on a pile of wood chippings outside Pelly's house as the sky gets darker.

There is a sense of foreboding in the air.

Here comes the summer.

That's about it

Love Maddie x