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...

As the swallows preen themselves, making last minute preparations for their flight south, the water gurgles and burbles down the street. A burst main, ignored by the water board. Across the road, the new water feature behind the gated gravelled drive of Monty Chocs-Away echoes in frustration on its endless, tinkling cycle. It yearns to be free like the youthful tributary in the road. I walk through the hayfield and pick up the last hay of the season, freshly turned. I put it to my nose, breathe in deeply and smell the last days of summer and the early days of my childhood. In the next field, the maize is as high as an elephant's eye and the path through it is unfamiliar, sinister, until you see the light at the end of the tunnel, the gateway down from Bluebell Hill and beyond. Every which way but loose. It is a like a scene from Hitchcock's North by Northwest. Any minute, I expect a crop dusting plane to appear from nowhere as Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint burst through the m...