The world from my window

I looked out at the world from my window. It was grey and a view I was not used to seeing. The waves gently crashed on the pebbles and the seagulls flew in ever decreasing circles. The weekend had not started well. The first clue in my birthday treasure hunt saw us sitting in the car for quarter of an hour while Mr Grigg tried to work it out and I became more and more exasperated. 'Maddie’s favourite Hitchcock film starring my cousin Archie? Is it The Birds , Rear Window ?’ ‘Oh for goodness sake,’ I said, hitting him with a road atlas. ‘The direction we're going is in the film title.’ ‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘Archie Leach, whose mother is on my family tree, is Cary Grant and he was in Adolf Hitchcock’s North by North East.’ I was tempted to beat him around the head with the Good Pub Guide but thought that wasn’t really in the birthday spirit. At this rate, we were going to end up in Grimsby. A leisurely day later and we are ambling up the cobbled hill into Cl...

A tattered St George’s flag ripples on top of the church. It is early morning and a regiment of rooks descends on the stays of the flagpole, sinister, like something from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds . The pink-tinged clouds signal the arrival of Homer’s rosy fingered dawn and The Enchanted Village awakes, twinkling lights coming on up and along the valley to a theme of The Planet Suite on my iPod. Autumn has well and truly arrived. At Halloween, candelit pumpkins grin in the windows while children dressed as vampires, skeletons and ghosts tour the village in packs, pouncing on sweets thrown from the doorways like pigeons after crumbs. At Mr and Mrs Champagne-Charlie’s, a bumper parcel arrives, stashed with fireworks. These are the ones Mr Grigg and his pals will be setting off on Friday evening to celebrate Bonfire Night. The crowds will be thronging the square, queuing up for burgers and hot dogs, going ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ in all the right places when Nobby Odd-Job and Mr Sheepwash ligh...