The world from my window

As the sun beats down on this soggy corner of England, the skies looking more Greece than Dorset, the news breaks that we have a thief in our midst. The village shop is always busy, at certain times of the day, located as it is on a square where four roads meet. This is the world from my window, the world I look out on and walk through every day. But this is something I did not see. No-one saw it happen - it just did. One minute the chill cabinet was full of bacon, the next minute, nothing. There were just two customers in the shop at the time: a respectable elderly lady who has lived here all her life apart from her formative years in a hamlet she still hankers after and an old gypsy woman, with carrier bags on her feet and a very large coat over her shoulders. The bacon, it is true, was on special offer. But Buy One Get One Free does not usually mean Steal One Get One Free. Suspicion has naturally fallen on Gypsy Rose Lee, which may appear rather judgmental but, hey, that's life...

You get to a certain age when the man in your life stops looking at younger women and gazes longingly at fallen trees. 'If I had a chainsaw, I'd be in there right now,' he says, as you ask him to keep his bloody eyes on the road to prevent him driving into a ditch. He becomes obsessed with wood, even though you don't yet have a fire to burn it on. 'Do you know how much a load of logs cost?' he says. As if you care. And then it begins. Talks with the listed building officer, planning applications, work on a new chimney for the old fireplace, you can't use old bricks as they're not fire proof... On and on and on until the fire is built and your man gets a hernia lifting a second-hand wood burning stove into the back of his car. And then the badgering begins. 'I'd really like a chainsaw,' he says, pressuring and persuading you. But you're not convinced, having read stories of people slitting their own throats through the careless use of...