The world from my window

As our plans to move abroad for a year progress, there are complaints in certain quarters. 'What about Book Club?' says the Fragrant Mrs Putter. 'Discussion by Skype?' I suggest. 'Who's going to be village hall chairman?' Mr Loggins wails. 'Somebody else?' Mr Grigg says. 'You can't go, you'll miss the harvest supper. We want Mr Grigg and his crew to do their YMCA routine as a finale,' says the parson's daughter. Celebrity Farmer's mother says: 'You've got come back to organise the fun day next year.' Well, we won't. And village life will go on. 'No it won't,' says someone else. 'It won't be the same without you.' It's flattering, all of this, but the village will still exist, things will still happen. Other people will step up to the plate and become catalysts.Lots of exciting things are on the horizon. It's just that we won't be there for some of them. Li...

Market day morning in my kind of town and the streets are paved with the bourgeois and the bohemian. It is bank holiday Saturday, the toffs are down from town and tourists with all the time in the world shuffle past stalls jam-packed with pretty things you don't need, bijou bollocks and frippery fuckwittery. In the almost 30 years since I have lived here, the town at certain times of the year lives up to its broadsheet moniker 'Notting Hill-on-Sea'. Jerry Hall was spotted on the arm of a local entrepreneur in the audience at a comedy night last week, and writers and artists are two a penny, holed up in the folds of the landscape while young locals struggle to get on the housing ladder. But after two o'clock in my kind of town on a Saturday, everything changes when the underbelly fall out of bed to stalk the streets with their exposed midriffs, gold chains and a choice turn of phrase. Meanwhile, inland, the weekend starts well, with the village square a hive of activity...