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...

Maddie's back! After narrowly avoiding clinching a book deal and a column in one of the weekend supplements, The World from my Window re-emerges as a regular look at life from England's rural underbelly. It is November 1 - All Souls Day - and in about an hour's time I have to lock up the church. I really need to check it first for tramps sleeping under pews before I turn the key. I'd best take a torch with me. It is very dark down here. There has been a rush on pumpkins at the local nursery for a Halloween competition in the village hall. The gardens and allotments society, in an attempt to get more people interested, put on the event for its AGM last night. We are not members but a friend is, and to show our support for him, we turned up with our pumpkin lantern to add to the table of entries at the back. My Lidl pumpkin, carved on Wednesday, had become quite soft and its once wide open mouth and crooked teeth had shut after the top lip sank into its chin. The committe...

Do you remember when you were young and watched something risque on the television with your parents right beside you? You'd be so embarrassed you'd stare, non-plussed, straight ahead, terrified of the look on their faces and fearing they might send you to bed once they had got over the shock. Well, we have just had the film Atonement in our village hall and when the sequence with the typewriter came on and Robbie typed the 'C' word you could even hear the tea cups in the kitchen gasp. And when the word kept resurfacing, again and and again, throughout the film my only hope was the entire village was dyslexic and thought the film was about King Cnut. It reminded me of a film show a while back when one of the village hall committee thought a film called La Spagnola looked quite good. The grey heads coped with the scenes showing fumbling in the back of a car. But when the ugly, aged aunt appeared on the giant screen, preparing a ratatouille and then took a fancy to a cour...