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...

I was trawling through the internet the other day, looking for something specific, when I came across something completely different. (That's the thing with the internet. It can take you down rabbit holes - some of which land you, like Alice, in Wonderland while others take you to a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.) Anyway, I came across a number of videos that formed part of Forever Archive, a project I helped research back in 2012.  Scarily, I was the subject of one of the inteviews, as they ran out of people to film. Here's the blurb: In 2012, the Forever Archive project set out to increase awareness of archive film and its relevance to our lives today, and to put across that the idea of archive film is a continuous process – the films from a hundred years ago are a fascinating insight into the way we used to live and similarly, the films we create today will be of huge interest in another hundred years. Archive film is not something alien and remote, locked into a...

It's that time of year again, when the coach stops off at Lush Places to pick up villagers for the annual outing to Sidmouth Folk Festival. There were only six of us this year, after several cancelled at the last minute and another overslept. Still, the people from the next village made up for it, with seventeen of them climbing aboard as we pulled up outside their pub. The view from the bus was glorious as we wove around the lanes, past Dorset's highest point and then on to the main road down into Devon. It was a quick stop-off at The Volunteer Inn first, where one pint turned, quite magically, into several. And then we wound our way down to the seafront where it was all happening, including a mesmerising performance on a handpan and then off to another pub in a quiet backstreet where there was some foot tapping music going on. There was more music and more stops at various pubs in the town, a picnic lunch on the beach before the tide came in, music and more stop...

They're playing Drink Up Thy Zider at Bristol City's ground, Ashton Gate. It's their song. So we drink up our cider and head for our seats, having gone through the turnstiles in a numbered entry system devised by the Romans for the Coliseum and other public buildings like it. But, unlike Ancient Rome, we're not segregated, we're all in this together. So we're sitting in front of a row of people in wheelchairs, a mother and young child two seats away... ...and, next to us, wafting across the stadium, are the strong smells of body odour, pasties and something with the aroma of Marmite (which, in this context, you wouldn't like at all even if you usually loved this foul, black yeast extract on your toast). It's approaching three o'clock and the crowd behind us starts singing. Their musical programme begins with the adaptation of a song by 70s glam rock group Slade, which starts off with an expletive followed by the words  Swindon Town  an...

So it's Mr Grigg's Big Birthday. He walks into the office to find his desk covered in balloons, cards, presents and a big Happy 60th banner. He is overwhelmed by the surprise, which includes a large box from The Bristol Cider Shop , full of bottles, a polypin and rather nice looking chutney. A little later he goes to the gents and comes back to find two young women dressed as police officers in his office. He sits in his chair, leans forward and rubs his hands together and says: 'OK. So get on with it then.' His secretary, behind them, shakes her head and waves her arms. Very slowly and with exaggerated mouthing, she mimes: 'No, they really are police officers.' Sometimes I think I am married to Del Boy Trotter . That's about it. Love Maddie x

Twelve years ago, I was invited to a school reunion. It was a strange experience, catching up with people I hadn’t seen since I left the school of hard knocks in the birthplace of powered fight in 1979. It started in the working men’s club that had recently been ravaged by fire. The paintwork was charred and there was still a sort of burnt smell in the air. I was hugged by the school bully, chatted up by the boy who had rejected me when I was twelve for having no personality and then Dancing Queen blared out from the disco next door as the formerly closet gay came out in all his glory. We moved on to gatecrash a party at the rugby club and the boys and girls who went out with each other at the age of thirteen ended up smooching to Lionel Richie on the dance floor. As the lights came back on, we all decamped to a friend’s house where the school swot lit up a joint. Through it all, I was totally sober and well behaved (unlike when I was at school where my quiet, studious side...