Amaizing encounters

As the swallows preen themselves, making last minute preparations for their flight south, the water gurgles and burbles down the street. A burst main, ignored by the water board.

Across the road, the new water feature behind the gated gravelled drive of Monty Chocs-Away echoes in frustration on its endless, tinkling cycle. It yearns to be free like the youthful tributary in the road.

I walk through the hayfield and pick up the last hay of the season, freshly turned. I put it to my nose, breathe in deeply and smell the last days of summer and the early days of my childhood.

In the next field, the maize is as high as an elephant's eye and the path through it is unfamiliar, sinister, until you see the light at the end of the tunnel, the gateway down from Bluebell Hill and beyond. Every which way but loose.

It is a like a scene from Hitchcock's North by Northwest. Any minute, I expect a crop dusting plane to appear from nowhere as Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint burst through the maize across my path.

'Oh, it's Roger Thornhill,' I will say and Cary will sweep me off my feet and kiss me, and Eva will look put out, because I am the first person in the whole film not to have mistaken him for CIA agent George Kaplan.

I emerge from the maize disappointed, only to find some nonchalant sheep grazing in the evening sun.

I pass a young man with a ring through his eyebrow accompanied by two giddy schoolgirls on their way up to the maize field.

'Awryte?' he says. He is no Cary Grant.

I make my way back up the road. A giant wooden toadstool put out for the rubbish men by Ted Moult and Jamie Lee gathers fungus outside their front gate.

And still the water burbles and gurgles down the street.

That's about it.

Love Maddie x