The world from my window

At last, my blog book,  A Year in Lush Places: Tales from England's Rural Underbelly , is out in paperback. It's been available in Kindle format for a little while now and I've been like an ant with a overdose of formic acid as I waited for the 'proper' book to arrive. And now it has, thanks to the good folks at FeedaRead .  It will also be available from leading booksellers. It's a slim little number - it's a novella, you see. Sneeze and you might miss a vital bit of the plot. But if you enjoy the Dorset part of this blog, I think you'll enjoy the book. Here's the blurb: Immersed in a sea of Barbour wearers and waves of Daily Mail readers, Maddie Grigg charts the highs and lows of a Dorset year as she attempts to swim against the tide in the lively and lovely village of Lush Places. From singing groups, book clubs and point-to-point, not to mention election wars, the village has it all. A quiet rebel, Maddie is married to a charmer, a m...

It's election time and the West Dorset countryside is awash with huge blue posters for our incumbent Tory MP, Oliver Letwin. Here and there, you see the odd splash of orange - a quiet, polite hoorah for the Liberal Democrats - but nothing at all for the others. I don't even know who our Labour candidate is. I'm aware, though, that our local Green Party candidate is a very gentle-looking Mrs Greene from Sherborne, who will probably get my vote for having the most appropriate name. Politics is a personal thing. In the Grigg household, we don't talk about it much, as Mr Grigg and I sit on opposite sides of the fence, waiting for it to topple over. He has never forgiven an old flatmate who completely ruined his Edward Du Cann sign by altering two letters in Cann and then stuck the poster in the window. Mr Grigg was nearly done for obscenity. Over the years, there have been some inspired defacing of political signs. Oliver Letwin became LetwinD and outside the railway stat...