The world from my window

Just when I think there is not much for me to write about if ever I did get round to doing the autobiography, two things happen. After a nice Sunday lunch of local hoggett, we sit down on the expansive Champagne-Charlie sofas and hear the Remembrance Sunday bells ringing outside. 'You have to come outside and listen to these,' I say. 'They're half muffled.' Mr Champagne-Charlie comes out like a shot but his wife, Bubble, and Pelly Sheepwash take a little persuading, until Mr Grigg explains how for years he has been going up in the bell tower, fastening the little leather mufflers to the clappers on the bells each Remembrance Sunday. In deference to his annual bravery, they come out with me to listen. The bells peal in rounds, clittery-clattery loud and then a perfect muffled echo. The bells are yelling to each other and whispering back. It is a conversation worth listening to. And then the ringers get into a sequence called Whittington: ' Turn again Wh...

And at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of the eleventh of the eleventh, Mr Grigg and I stood in silence outside the church. I could hear the cawing of rooks overhead, the sound of gunfire in the towns beyond the hills as everyone else's two-minute silence began and ended at different times. And I thought of my grandfathers, brave old souls, giving it all in the war to end all wars, with my maternal grandfather stopping every now and then to write a poem about it. I thought of my paternal grandfather's best friend, killed in France and lying in the British ceremony at Courcelette, a fact we discovered only through the marvels of internet research a year or so ago. And I thought of Mr Grigg's uncle, killed on HMS Glorious by the German battleship Scharnhorst in World War II, never to know his nephews, one of whom was named after him. Similar stories repeated to this day,widows and orphans made from the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. And I th...

On a wet autumn day, Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks plays on my stereo. Which is appropriate really, as we have just celebrated Bonfire Night a few days late with the village fireworks. The composer is the right choice but it really ought to be Handel's Water Music, as the rain it raineth, and raineth all the night. We should have known; the forecasters and village soothsayers were all saying the same, as they waved printouts from the BBC website. Beware the rain. But we live in such a strange place, the weather can be completely different from locations just a few miles away. When the sun is shining on the coast just down the road, up here we're in fog land. However, despite the forecast we decided to go for it because of our wise old neighbour next door. In our house, he is known as Gandalf because we are convinced he is a wizard. He does not come and go out of his front door any more, like the little man and woman who lived in the weather house on my grandparents...