The world from my window

I've just been out for a morning walk with the dog. This landscape always fills me with such hope and promise. Especially when you look down or at eye level to see the smaller picture. I've blogged about it here for  A Dorset Year . At the weekend I spied a dragonfly washing its face. As someone said after seeing this, if I'd had a more powerful microphone, you might have heard it singing I'm So Pretty . That's about it. Love Maddie x

It's a blazing hot, autumn day and I'm out here in the sunshine, my best man by my side, and we're laying a hedge. A hedge . Me laying a hedge. My farming dad and grandfathers would be proud of me. Well, maybe not proud of the way I'm struggling to swing a billhook into the stem of this hazel. But perhaps proud of me for trying. Each year, the Melplash Agricultural Society puts on the annual hedging and ploughing match . Next Sunday, it's at Chideock. It's a great day out for all the family.  I'm taking part in a free, hedgelaying taster day at Mangerton Lane, near Bridport, where groups of up to four are being instructed in this age-old art by experts in the field. It's a lovely part of Dorset, bordered by a line of beautiful, rounded hills running from Loders to Powerstock. It's an enchanted landscape where the swallows and swifts gather for the last hurrah before the long journey south. A quick demonstration on the roadside hedgerow ...

The village square is on its knees. Tumbleweed drifts slowly by the old village stores, where the blinds have been pulled for a couple of years now. Across the road, the shop last used a few months ago by the church on Saturday mornings, as a gathering place for coffees and a natter, has its windows whitened out. The jackdaws gather. Ominously. And not a drop of water comes out of the old pump under the signpost. In a new development, the downstairs windows of the pub were boarded up on Monday. Six workmen waited outside for an hour until they could get in and seal off our hostelry from the outside world. In the last sixteen years, I've never seen that happen in between landlords (and we've had nine of them in that time). Let's hope it signals a refurbishment and not closure. We need our pub. In the meantime, the community spirit that is so endemic in this village is alive and well and living in the village hall. There's all sorts of stuff going on here...