The world from my window

After the La La Land madness at last night's Oscars ceremony, in which the hit musical movie was given Best Picture award by mistake instead of Moonlight , here in the UK we'll be sitting down tonight to watch our own award-winning drama. It's the third and final and long-awaited series of Broadchurch .  In Dorset, this programme is particularly special, because much of it was filmed at West Bay, with its wonderful layer-cake cliffs. When the first series of Broadchurch was broadcast on ITV in early 2013, I was away in Greece, having exchanged my life in west Dorset for a year in Corfu. Writer Chris Chibnall has described the show as his love letter to the area he is proud to call home. And being so far away from my own home, I was desperate to see the programme everyone was talking about. When I got hold of the DVD box set, I understood. It's not comfortable viewing but it's utterly compelling. Here's a personal reflection which I wrote about for...

One of my all-time musical heroes is eighty five today. Take a bow, Mr John Williams . You are epic. By Chris Devers (Flickr: DSC_0937.JPG) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons This man, this incredible man, has provided the soundtrack to so many wonderful films which have become the soundtracks to our lives. Of course, there's Star Wars and Jaws and ET and Indiana Jones . He also wrote the music to  Schindler's List, Lincoln (now there's a film for current times), Saving Private Ryan,   Memoirs of a Geisha, Home Alone and many, many more .  The man is a legend, bringing classical musical to the masses through these fantastically atmospheric film scores. How can anyone not like the theme to Jurassic Park ? So when Mr Grigg and I were travelling travelling up to Heathrow last year (on our way to Colombia, don't you know) and heard a plug on the radio for a special Radio 2  Friday Night Is Mus...

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...

Over on A Dorset Year , I'm enjoying the beauty in nature in a world gone mad. As my famous ancestor, Ernest Hemingway , would have noted, the sun also rises.  To read more, please visit A Dorset Year . That's about it. Love Maddie x

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. Let's build bridges, not walls. That's about it. Love Maddie x

Over on A Dorset Year , I'm talking fly-tipping, longed-for snow and a big old moon. That's about it. Love, Maddie x

On the first day of the New Year, brave souls in fancy dress head for the sea at Lyme Regis in the now traditional ‘Lyme Lunge’, organised by the local Rotary Club, in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support. ‘Dip into the balmy waters of Lyme Bay,’ the promotional material states. You can almost hear the  Cadbury’s Caramel bunny doing the voiceover . But it’s cold in that there ocean. My brother swims about six strokes and then he’s out, like a flying fish. Rather him than me. Go to A Dorset Year for more. That's about it. Love Maddie x