The world from my window

Artemis the Dog should have been called Chewy, really. Not as in Chewbacca , although she looks very like a Wookie. But Chewy as in, well, chewy . These were my best boots. Lovely.  Now look at them, along with Mr Grigg's best shoes. At eighteen months, she's still a puppy. 'They take a long time to mature, Korthals Griffons,' says the dog trainer. 'How long?' I ask. 'Oh, about ten years.' Even here, perched in our eyrie on our Greek village (cue excuse to show photos of Agios Magikades), she is still up to her old tricks. After an encounter with a pair of my grand-daughter's beautiful golden butterfly sandals... ...we've improvised a storage place for shoes. It's one of the door grilles, which we point out to everyone who comes to stay. When things are out of her reach, she just can't be bothered. She'll sit in the plateia, the locals making a fuss of her. 'Artemi, Artemi,' they...

Hi there... Haven't blogged in ages but so much has happened on our Antipodean adventure, and much of it without the aid of the internet. Since my last post, Mr Grigg and I have been Waltzing Matilda in Sydney, driving up the coast to Brisbane sampling the delights of the Hunter Valley, looking at the Richmond Valley sugar cane fields through the expert eye of a Somerset farmer who emigrated out here in the 1940s and exploring the sub-tropical rain forests. And the highpoint? Finding remnants of my great-uncle's life, with a TV series of his adopted town in the offing. Though, sadly, not from my pen but the creators of the Australian version of TV's Heartbeat , who obviously spotted the potential of Rappville, north New South Wales, before we got there. A one-horse, one-track, one-railway track town screaming out for a movie based around it. And in the screenplay I will never write, my great-uncle will be played by Eric Bana. Anyway, more of that later. Today, Mr Grigg an...

You know your day is not going well when halfway through the morning, you're at work and you discover your knickers are inside out. What makes it worse is they're the Bridget Jones big kind and the waistband is higher than the one on your trousers. So the world and his wife knows officially how big your arse is. My day at the Death Star started like this yesterday and then got worse. I broke my mug when someone walked through a door in front of me. I was startled, the mug I was carrying became like a juggling ball with an in-built electric shock system and it flew out of my hands. The handle smashed all over the floor. Then, as I filled up my excuse for a mug with hot water from the dispenser, I turned away to get milk out of the fridge. I know how long I usually have to do this because the pipe is furred up and the water takes ages to come through. However, some bastard had fixed it, hadn't they? Scalding hot water went everywhere. So I was looking forward to an evening la...