The world from my window

This weekend I changed my Blogger profile picture: (I'll explain later).   Now if I'd been wearing it at last night's Mr Scruff gig, no-one would have batted an eyelid. Girls in bear hats, boys in crocheted hats, pork pie hats and baseball caps, an old man in shades with a wispy Salvador Dail-style moustache and goatee, Mr Grigg in a Wobble Control tee-shirt and a white bearded steward who looked like he could quite easily have done the James Robertson Justice voiceover in the surreal track, Fish . Trout are freshwater fish and have underwater weapons  Trout are very valuable and immensely powerful  Keep away from the trout Mr Scruff himself, with headphones atop his smooth head like a Roman emperor wearing a crown of laurel leaves. His adoring public whooped and hollered to pulsating beats and Latin rhythms. And still the Electric Palace clock said five past nine. My blog characters, all bar Pelly and Anakin Sheepwash, decided to give...

It's only part-way through my birthday weekend and I've been completely spoiled and I'm thoroughly knackered. First, the Melplash Show. My favourite day of the year. So good of them to organise it for my birthday. And so good of Celebrity Farmer to almost spill the beans about my birthday surprise. 'I've been told you've booked a room at The Riverside,' he said to me and Mr Grigg, who promptly stood rather heavily on the toe of his wellington boot. 'Um, but then you decided to go somewhere else,' Celebrity Farmer said, in rather too much of a hurry. The hole just got bigger and bigger until even I wished I could jump in it with him After the show, instead of going home, we ended up at West Bay, my favourite seaside place. 'That's the one with the gurt hole in the middle,' my father usually says, referring to the harbour. You can just make out the pink house here, the old home of my mentor, the late David Martin . A...

Um, happy birthday to me. As the big five-oh arrives, there is a huge call to arms from a load of people about the village shop and the pub. 'WE NEED TO KEEP THEM BOTH OPEN!' Um, I'm not sure I can do that on my own but I know of some people who can. That's about it. But, by the way, never seen the pub more busy than after a crisis meeting We should do this more often... That's about it. Love Maddie x

Every now and then on the internet, you come across a gem you just want to share. So let me take you on a journey, on what I think is a fascinating journey, to West Bay, the seaside port for My Kind of Town and the place where Mr Grigg and I will soon be having a boat. If you have a little time to spare, watch the archive film. It's great. And then listen to the modern-day locals on the audio, telling you what makes West Bay so special.   The website is called Close Encounters and I know about it because I was involved in putting some of the material together. I think you'll like it. That's about it. Love Maddie

  My ears are still ringing. The gig of the year, my Weymouth friend says. I wouldn't argue with that. 'Not a bit poptastic, then?' asks Pelly 'I-grew-up-with-prog-rock' Sheepwash this morning. 'No, slaptastic,' I say, beaming. I went back twenty-odd years last night to see Level 42 and, do you know? They're better now than they were then. Mind you, I was only a few months away from giving birth to Number One Son and spent all night standing on a cold, concrete floor in the Showering Pavilion at Shepton Mallet. Now that I'm nearly fifty, the comfy seats of Weymouth Pavilion came in handy. But the pounding bass of Mark King and those lovely harmonising vocals of keyboard player Mike Lindup got me out of my seat. Music to my ageing ears. No wonder I've got tinnitus. A misspent youth of disco music, punk rock, jazz funk and chillout. And a bit of folk interspersed. And what's more, even Mr Grigg enjoyed the gig, despite thinking...

Oh, calamity and woe. Not only has our shopkeeper had another change of heart and is shutting up the store on September 1, our pub is due to close when the landlords leave in October. The brewery is looking for a new publican, but how seriously, no-one can tell. Cripes. After a village square full of activity, I fear there will be only a village square full of nothing. It's as if the ley lines beneath our feet have shorted out. There are people working hard behind the scenes to sort this out. As I write, Mr Grigg and Mr Putter are in deep conversation...in the pub. I am half temped to say 'I'll do it!' But having run a pub for Palmers Brewery for three years, I can safely say it's not the easiest of tasks. (If you go to the link and have to take a step back from the screen, I apologise. Someone should tell them black is not a good background for a website). We increased the trade, but at some cost to our personal lives. Number One Son's second cousin ...

Oh my. Dorset is going to be bathed in swathes of light. The spotlight is literally turning on Hardy's Dorset, rural Dorset, that bucolic bubble of beauty, my enchanted village and villages everywhere. Those nice people at Dorset County Council are going to improve our street lighting. Rural Dorset, embrace your inner urban child. The street lights roadshow is coming to town...and villages and hamlets to a street, lane or cul-de-sac near you. Here's a leaflet about it: Is that Canary Wharf I see in the distance? Or is it Hong Kong? It isn't Lush Places, that's for sure. Our dear Lush Places, with its village pump, the green, the red phone box and historic buildings all around. But it could be soon, believe me it. It could be lots of lovely places all over this hidden gem of a county. Those quiet, secret corners of Dorset suddenly exposed for all to see. Because the county council has entered into a private finance initiative (PFI) pact - not with the de...

I am for ever being told I ought to make my blog into a novel. 'You have such a way with words,' Mr Grigg tells me. 'If I didn't live here I think you'd made it up,' Mrs Bancroft says. 'You write much better than some of the people on The Observer,' an earnest Pelly Sheepwash says. And little Tuppence, dear elfin Tuppence, she of the leggings, Goth gloves and an asymmetric bob, smiles a big smile and says: 'Just go for it Maddie.' Doggers on Bluebell Hill, dreams of Gingsters pasties stuck where the sun don't shine, a begonia allergy and a cast of colourful characters as long as Mr Grigg's tongue when Posh Totty trots past, it's all here. The trouble is, I need a plot. And I think I've lost it. That's about it. Love Maddie x

And as I sit in this bubble of loveliness, this village I call Lush Places, I wonder what it's all about. Down here, we are like Japanese soldiers who are holed up on an island and don't know the war has ended. If it weren't for the TV, radio, newspapers and social media, we would be none the wiser. With all this weirdness swirling around like twisters in parts of this green and pleasant land , the trouble seems very distant, even though my dear namesake niece in Woolwich is a bottle's throw away from some of it. When the worst thing to happen in The Enchanted Village is that someone scrawls a swear word inside the play tunnel or writes ' You are gay ' on Mrs Bancroft's car in the snow or leaves a field gate open, the London that is burning today is a different world. Although it is distant, the news we are seeing and hearing feel like the end of the world as we know it. Riots and nastiness spreading like wildfire, a Northern Lights polar bear ...

'And they're off!' the race commentator announces, as eight assorted terriers tear up the field after a stuffed thing on a piece of string. Junior wins by default, as Mullet, Holly, Rascal and Rivet get two feet past the starting line and decide to have a fight. We're at the terrier races, an event that's been going for 37 years and just up from the road where I was born.  Now I've completed my OU studies, I have time on my hands so I suggest to Mr Grigg we head for the hills to find out what it's all about. Amazingly, this is the one event not to be featured in any Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall programme. And in amongst the plate smashing, the hoopla and tombola, and a commentator who is wearing a red jacket, top hat and a new pair of teeth for the occasion, I see glimpses of my past. People who were at school with me stroll around with cobweb tattoos on their elbows, baseball caps at jaunty angles and gobble up fat hot dogs washed down with a ...

Mr Grigg has been singing this all day. I only went and got a first. That's about it. Love Maddie x

I'm all-a-jitter this week. Four years of work has come to an end, and by Friday I'll know whether it's been worth it. At the beginning of the new century, I promised myself I'd get a degree by the time I was fifty. My birthday is fast approaching and so, I hope, is the postman. Back in the late 1970s, I went straight into journalism training. I didn't want to go to unversity, partly because that path was what had been expected of me for years (and I never do the expected). I also didn't think it was right to spend three self-indulgent years poncing around lonely as a cloud when I could dive straight into a Devon newsroom. I'd wanted to be a newspaper reporter since I was ten years old so, I figured, why wait? But the main reason for not going to university was I rather mucked up my chances. On the day I was due to take my biology O-Level I gave birth to Number One Daughter. So, in 2007 and several careers later, I signed up for an honours degree w...