The world from my window

Easter in Corfu. Moving and bonkers. Here's the bonkers bit:     And then a mad scramble to pick up the broken pieces after the  Easter Saturday pot smashing in Corfu  Town is all over. We took ours home and put them on the mantelpiece as an offering to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth and home before a siesta and the evening festivities to come. That's about it. Love Maddie x *First published 4 May 2013

* First published 2 May 2013 The sense of anticipation is mounting here in Corfu for Holy Week. Church bells ring twice a day as the devout and those who do not want to risk eternal damnation make their preparations for Easter and pile into the church. In the evening, the village plateia is alive with people as the congregation mingles with the card players and coffee drinkers, beer imbibers and children, now on school holidays and tearing around on bicycles. There are swallows and swallowtails, hooting owls, croaking frogs, waking cicadas and a host of magical fireflies flitting around the lanes and gardens. The air is heavy with the scent of jasmine and mock orange blossom. Yesterday was Labour Day, a May Day celebration which saw garlands on doors and small posies of wild flowers under car windscreen wipers. At first, I thought Turkey Spiros (so called because he breeds turkeys) had a female admirer when I noticed a bunch of marigolds on his bonnet. An hour later, Mr Grigg had ...

This week, in the build-up to Greek Easter and the release of my new book, Good Morning, Corfu: A Year on a Greek Island , I will be republishing some posts written during the twelve months that I lived in a rural village in North West Corfu. The book is now available to order as an ebook on Kindle and also as a paperback . I'll be doing a signing in Corfu on Greek Easter Monday and also in Bridport in May. Here's the blurb: Good Morning, Corfu: A Year on a Greek Island charts the spell woven by this Greek island on an English couple for whom the past is in danger of being more exciting than the future. In an honest, affectionate and warm account of a grown-up gap year, UK magazine columnist Maddie Grigg introduces the reader to a cast of real-life characters and the rich history of Corfu’s traditions, and reveals what happens when the holidaymakers have gone home. Who wouldn't want to throw in the day-job and head off to the sun for a year? Just like the Durrells, M...

So, what do you think of it so far? The Durrells , I mean. If you live in the UK, Sunday evenings on the telly have just got a whole lot gentler. The always-watchable Keeley Hawes heads the cast in a series based on Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy. And it's pretty sublime. The warmth and light of Corfu shines through in this very enjoyable series. It's a bit like The Darling Buds of May  only set in Greece. Just the thing for a Sunday evening. It's got me hankering after Corfu, where I lived for a year in 2012-2013. I do pop back there from time to time and I know how lucky I am to have a foot in beautiful West Dorset and another in the jewel of the Ionian (although I have to be careful not to do the splits). Corfu Dorset Just like the Durrells, we left rainy Dorset, pretty much on a whim, for life on a Greek island. Who wouldn't want to up sticks and escape the drudgery of the day job? Especially to Greece. Dorset Corfu But my grown-up g...

There's a bit of news on the horizon - my book Good Morning, Corfu: a Year on A Greek Island is due to be published in paperback and for Kindle over the weekend of UK May Day bank holiday and Greek Easter 2016. I'm planning to be in Corfu to launch it and hope to have a signing session in Dorset a week or so later. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, I leave you with this, the work of a talented young illustrator, Laura Brown, who created this short, graphic novel for a university course, with the help of some quotes from me, last year. Things have moved on a bit since last year. But if you're thinking of going abroad this summer, visit Greece. You will not be disappointed. That's about it. Love Maddie x

There is nothing quite like a steam train to get those nostalgic feelings surfacing. I was born next to the Chard branch line but can't remember the trains travelling along the track because it closed in 1962.  Apparently, though, I went on the last train, safely tucked up in a pram, with my parents and siblings. It's a nature reserve now, and well worth a visit. The old halt has been restored, and there's a lovely statue of a little girl who was evacuated to the village in the Second World War . There's something reassuring about a steam train, the sound, the sight and the smell of it taking people back to an age gone by, a period of time in which things seemed much more simple but probably weren't. That's what nostalgia does for you, it makes you look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. So when I heard via Facebook that a recreation of the historic Devon Belle was going to pass through the main line closest to Lush Places - several miles from ...