Fifty shades of Grigg

So there we were, Mrs Bubbles Champagne-Charlie, Mrs Bancroft and me, sitting at the bar, swinging our legs from the stools while the men talked about the Olympics.

As their chatter got on to the women's volleyball team (yawn), I decided to pep up the ladies' conversation by asking their thoughts on Fifty Shades of Grey. Not that it's on The Enchanted Village's book club list but we've all read it anyway.

Champagne-Charlie's ears pricked up immediately.

'Fifty Shades...that's not the mucky book Bubbles has been reading?' he said.

Mr Grigg snorted. 'Maddie said she'd read me extracts of that on holiday but she never did. I was most disappointed.'

'That's because it was rubbish,' I said, having read Erica Jong's Fear of Flying at an impressionable age. (Fifty Shades hurt my feminist bone. And not in a good way).

'Rubbish?' said Mrs Bancroft. 'It was like a sexed-up Mills and Boon.'

'But it was quite erotic,' she and Bubbles agreed.

'Erotic?' I scoffed. 'It was awful. I had to flick through the sex bits to get to what happened next. I found it rather dull.'

'Oh Maddie, you're such a prude,'  Bubbles said. She does condescending very well. Mrs Bancroft sniggered. Both of them, laughing at me. Like teenagers when their eight-year-old sister asks the meaning of a rude word.

Flustered, I said the first thing that came into my head. That'll shut them up, I thought.

'I'm not a prude,' I said. 'It's just that it's all a bit old hat really. I mean, I've done all those things in the book, anyway. All you need is a green hornet vibrator and a pair of manacles and anyone can do it.'

Mr Grigg almost choked on his cider. The ginger wig blew up the street like tumbleweed, the church clock struck thirteen and faces all around the pub - especially in Compost Corner - froze in time.

I was right. It did shut them up.

That's about it.

Love Maddie x