The world from my window

The church clock strikes 9 as Mr Grigg ambles across the village square to get the Sunday papers from the shop. His walk holds a distant memory of a Ginsters pasty and an evening of celebrations for Oak Apple Day. He hobbles past the village pump which, while we were looking the other way, has sprouted a cement pot either side planted with bizzy lizzies. The sun streams through our bedroom window as if we are on holiday. Children's voices echo across the green, loud and then not so loud as they go up and down on the swings. A wood pigeon coos and a jackdaw rat-a-tat-tats. Mr Sheepwash flip-flops by with The Observer, the people up the road have their noses stuck in The Sunday Telegraph and a man from the council houses is wrapped up in the News of the World. But this is very much Mail on Sunday territory, as the Tory posters standing proud in gardens and on windows in the lead-up to the county council elections testify. Pelly once inadvertently picked up a note from the shop whic...

It feels like the first morning of spring. The sky is clear and blue, the sun is glinting on the golden stone walls of the garden and the church bells are ringing. But this is Griggsville, where the man on number three bell is like Jonesy from Dad's Army and always several beats behind everyone else. Clive Dunn as Corporal Jones in Dads Army This morning, Mr Grigg threw the bedroom window open to let the day in. The songbirds were going full pelt, the jackdaws were cawing as they prepared themselves for bedding down in a suitable chimney when the time comes to nest. A dove cooed from the rooftops as the village folk ambled to the shop across the Square for the Sunday papers. A motorycle chugged by, with that reassuring, low bubbling throaty sound only British bikes make. In the distance we could hear the faint sound of drum and bass from a boy racer's car going around the one-way system. I looked at the map of the south west yesterday, on the wall of Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-It-All...