The world from my window

This is the piece I read out on World Book Night for the new book Dorset Voices : Let me take you now to Lush Places, an enchanted village where the luvvies seldom venture, where the mist swirls around and around the top of Bluebell Hill like a maelstrom. Just down the road is that well-heeled, genteel little Dorset town whose name all non-locals mispronounce. ‘We love Bee -minster,’ they say, their unintentional mistake instantly revealing that they are not of this county. They don’t see the bored youngsters on a Saturday night, the sad, drug-taking loser in a dirty flat, the lonely old lady living on her own, and the couple yelling at each other in front of their children and a blaring television. ‘And we just love Bridport,’ the incomers say. It’s so arty, so Bohemian, so cosmopolitan .’ And as they venture through the artists’ quarter, picking up pieces of distressed furniture for next to nothing but making a tidy profit for their owners who bought it ...

It'll be World Book Night in a week's time and I'm getting excited because I've just been notified my books are ready for collection. Twenty four copies of Stephen King's Misery will be winging their way to the unsuspecting. The book features just two characters but is one of the most powerful stories I've ever read. It's tense, intense, chilling and thrilling. It's electrifying. King's prose is crystal clear, stripped bare and straight to the point. None of that cockadoodee nonsense for me. No siree. Hell, I'm his Number One Fan. I'm giving it away to some of the snobbier members of my book club, who dismiss Stephen King as 'that horror writer', and via the mobile office of an organisation whose customers might well have seen the film but never read the book. World Book Night will also be a bit of a celebration for me. I've had a piece of work chosen for Dorset Voices , a new collection of prose, poetry and photogra...

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...