The world from my window

Back in Corfu, I'm working on a number of creative projects. There's  A Year in Lush Place s, a 'faction' of the year 2010 and all my favourite characters. I'm putting the finishing touches to this because, a long time ago, a blogger called Dave Pie and Mash, along with a few others, told me I should. I haven't heard from him since. So a blog shout to Dave: I'm doing this for you! Then there is my ongoing diary, Kalimera Kerkyra, about our grown-up gap year in Corfu. This will be out as a novel some time next year. I'm also dusting off the first novel I wrote but never published. It's inspired by my days as a young newspaper reporter in My Kind of Town in the 1980s. I've persuaded two other creative types whose debut novels set in the same place remained, like mine, festering in a drawer, to bring theirs out at the same time. The three together will be the Bridport Trilogy. It might not win the Booker or even  the   Bridport  Prize   b...

In the summer of 2007 I reinvented myself. I was tired of being pigeon-holed under the name I usually went by. I wanted to break free from the personal straitjacket of a locally high profile job I'd had for five years. So I took the first name of my maternal grandmother and married it to the maiden surname of my maternal grandmother. And so Maddie Grigg was born. I liked her a lot. She was a bit kooky, a wild romantic who lapped up the world around her and with a fine eye for detail, the amusing and the amazing. She was my online self, the real me behind that other, duller person. A rural Bridget Jones and not as fat. The irony is that the Grigg side of me comes from a long line of recluses, three of whom to this day live in separate corners of the same Somerset field. It's as if my assertive granny (Maddie) has kicked my shy granny into action. One of Maddie's poems was shortlisted in the prestigious Bridport Prize competition, her blog was chosen as a Blog of Not...