Heads up, it's the scarecrow festival

 

In cosy cottages and council houses in The Enchanted Village, in mansions and farms, there are bits of bodies everywhere.

The odd head here, a limb there. A ginger wig, lots of stuffing and chicken wire. In the Grigg household there is a headless mannequin, standing in the shadows waiting for something to happen.

Cunning plans are taking shape.

It's the village scarecrow festival.

Over the years, we've had politics (Maggie Thatcher), football (an England football fan surrounded by lager cans), events in history (Nell Gwynne), flights of fancy (The Red Baron) and characters from children's books and TV (The BFG and Homer and Bart Simpson lounging on the sofa, but not all three at once. Now that would be ridiculous).

The annual event taxes brains, ingenuity, artistic ability and lateral thinking. If the best way to make a head is doing papier mache around a balloon, how do you make the neck and then secure it to the torso? And can you be bothered to make hands if you can use gloves instead? And if it sits down or leans out of a window, will that save you from making a pair of legs?

Oh, the thought that goes into it.

Mr Loggins and Champagne-Charlie are both new kids on the block and have just popped into the Grigg house looking for pointers. The latter is doing a poacher and hopes to bag a couple of rabbits from Nobby Odd-Job's lawn to use as props in the scarecrow's pocket. Such attention to detail.

Mrs Champagne-Charlie says why bother doing a scarecrow at all when her husband can sit outside the house instead?

Meanwhile, in our house, the pale-looking mannequin lurks like a headless ghost in a haunted house, surrounded by dust and junk as the builders' work forces us into dark corners not usually inhabited.

Our mannequin is disabled, courtesy of the vicar who, a few years ago for reasons unknown, borrowed the body and then brought it back minus its right hand.

Mr Grigg made several kinky remarks about why she would want to keep the hand.  When she got married a year later, he suggested she really didn't have a need for all those extra digits and should bring the hand back.

I have to say I didn't understand what he was talking about. But then I have led a very sheltered life.

Anyway, I have to go, a headless torso and a strange accessory from a fancy dress shop is calling me.

That's about it.

Love Maddie x