The world from my window

It's England's national day and the St George's Cross is flying high on the church flagpole. Across the road, the brewery has just picked up a load of empty beer barrels from the pub and stocked up its cellar with full ones. In the fields, there are cuckoo flowers. Great drifts of them. The naked ash tree is silhouetted against a bright blue sky and the old shepherd and his dog on my late father's weather vane trudge ever onwards. In the village hall where Mr Grigg and I had our wedding reception many moons ago, they're clearing up the remains of the cider festival. The golden nectar of my grandparents' days, when they made cider from their own orchards and no additives were involved, is now quite rightly enjoying a resurgence. Thomas Hardy loved it, as you can gather in this extract from Great Things : Sweet cyder is a great thing,      A great thing to me, Spinning down to Weymouth town      By Ridgway thirstily, And ma...

Where are you now, you North Somerset Yeomen, Who came, swift to answer your country's appeal, To pit your raw strength 'gainst the might of the foemen, To give shot for shot, to oppose steel to steel? You came, not for gain, for reward or for glory, And little you heeded where duty's path led; You wrote your full page in our England's proud story, Thanked God for your victories, and mourned for your dead. For some lie near Ypres, beneath the clay sleeping; They suffered, they died, but no inch would they yield, And dull leaden skies up above them are weeping, For them, as they lie 'neath the battle scarred field. And all up and down where the old trench-line wandered, The plain wooden crosses their message proclaim; Yet no man may say that their young lives were squandered- They died for this England; they rest in their fame. Where are you now, you North Somerset Yeomen, Bred to the ploughtail, the desk or the mine? ...