Maddie Grigg

Use your vote

It’s the local elections this coming Thursday and, for the first time ever, I won’t be voting.

Not for any reasons of self-righteousness, although my political fire has dimmed over the years to the point where it’s barely a spark. This is not surprising, given all the corruption and arrogance of our elected politicians in Westminster. That lot have ceased to have relevance to me, with so many of them only in it for themselves, which is something I never thought I’d hear myself say.

The local elections, though, are different. Or should be.

Our elected councillors are the women and men who can make a real difference to our everyday, local lives, although hamstrung by central government which has a habit of taking away funding and then blaming any shortcomings on the local council.

And, on the whole, local councillors get involved to make things better for their local area. It’s easy to criticise and make unfair assertions about their motives. It can be a thankless job but someone has to do it on our behalf. That’s what democracy is all about. They work for us (as do the MPs, but that’s another story).

This year, I’m in France, and, although I registered for a postal vote in good time, the paperwork hasn’t arrived. Time is ticking away and I fear I will not be able to cast my X in the box, as I have been doing since I was an eighteen-year-old firebrand.

These days, I am a lapsed revolutionary but I still make a point of visiting the polling station on election day, particularly as women fought so hard, all over the world, for the vote.

This year, however, I’ve been disenfranchised by the vagaries of the British and French postal system.

To be honest, though, it solves my dilemma. My heart would dictate I vote one way, which would be a waste of time. I could never vote another way, as it’s not part of my DNA although I am sure the candidate would and could do a very good job on behalf of the local community.

I would have been tempted to vote another way apart from the candidate, who, frankly, I would not go near with a proverbial bargepole, except perhaps to use it to knock their ego into touch.

So, at least I have an excuse for my lack of enthusiasm.

There’s also the vote for the police and crime commissioner which, I think, leaves most people cold because we don’t really understand the role. Now, if the candidate for police commissioner was Tom Selleck as Frank Reagan (below) in the American police procedural drama television series Blue Bloods, well, that might be different.

However, if you care about your local community and you’re registered to vote, please use it, and use it wisely. And don’t forget to take some form of photo ID with you, otherwise you won’t be allowed to cast your vote at all.

Church bell story chimes with petition organiser

Well, it seems neither the local newspapers nor the BBC is interested in the village bells debacle in my village.

It’s no longer newsworthy.

This is probably because the silencing of church clocks chiming is now commonplace all over the country. More of that later.

You’ll recall from my blog post of 18 March that the church clock stopped its hourly chiming, just two days after it was repaired.

A village resident complained about the hourly chiming – possibly having moved in when the clock wasn’t working – so the church stopped it completely.

The parochial church council has now reached a compromise solution to fit a silencer so that the clock chimes only between the hours of 6am and 9pm. This will be at a cost of around £800 rather than the original estimate of well over £2,000.

‘The feeling by many members of the PCC that, although the aim of the Church in the village was to “make Jesus known,” it was not felt necessary to remind everybody of his presence throughout the night,’ the PCC said in a statement.

So all’s well that ends well. Or not, as many local people are still unhappy that one complaint can stop the village clock chiming at all.

Without getting all Wicker Man and pitchforks at dawn – and there are far bigger problems and threats to democracy in the wider world – it can seem like rural life is under threat when some newcomers complain about things like the sound of church bells, animal smells, mud on the road and farmers working through the night.

The chiming of church bells is an ongoing problem. There was a similar issue recently in Witheridge, Devon, and also just down the road in the same county at Kenton in 2021.

All over the country, the church powers-that-be are worried about being slapped with noise abatement orders by their local councils. More and more clocks in towns and villages have stopped chiming .

I’ve just been contacted by a woman in Sandwich, Kent, where the night-time chiming of the bells was stopped in 2017 after one complaint by a neighbour.

June Summerhayes saw my blog and asked me to support her petition to the government calling for clock chimes to be exempt from noise abatement regulations.

I’ve signed it and told her I would help publicise her campaign. Understandably, she’s rather dismayed that, at the time of writing, only 85 people have signed so far.

You can add your signature to the petition here.

Mrs Summerhayes says: ‘Recognise the special place that clock chimes have in British life and history. Many churches have had to silence night time clock chimes because a single person, or a few people have complained. We believe this is unjust if the majority support the chimes.

‘We want noise abatement regulations to be amended so that they do not apply to clock chimes. This should also mean that any previously issued noise abatement orders in respect of clock chimes cease to have effect.’

At 10,000 signatures, the government will respond to this petition. At 100,000 signatures, the petition will be considered for debate in Parliament.

Book Corner

I have the good fortune to be a reviewer for NetGalley, a website which distributes advance reader copies of books to hundreds of thousands of members in exchange for honest reviews.

I was introduced to it by a friend in Lush Places, who insisted it would be for me after we started reviewing books from the village phone box library during lockdown.

It was too much hassle at first, but she kept on at me until I signed up and requested my first book. Thank you, Vikki!

Several years on, I’m now getting some amazing (free) downloads for my Kindle. The more books you review online, the more likely you’ll be approved for books in your favourite genres.

I share my reviews on the Goodreads platform or here on this blog.

I don’t very often award five stars but I’ve had some absolute corkers recently. Here are a couple of novels to look out for (both books are available to pre-order):

You Are Here by David Nicholls (due to be published by Sceptre 23 April 2024).

I was very excited to be approved for the latest David Nicholls novel. It didn’t disappoint. I didn’t want it to end, although I did, to find out what happened.

Michael and Marnie are two single strangers approaching middle age, living lonely, separate lives, north and south of the country. Michael is a geography teacher, obsessed with geology and his broken relationship with his beloved ex. Marnie is a self-employed, self-taught book editor who is finding her way after divorcing her entirely unsuitable husband She is anchored to her work, her ‘cosmopolitan’ life in London and, most of all, the joys of the English language.

The two are thrown together by a mutual friend on an arduous walk across luscious countryside in the Lake District and Yorkshire Moors. As the walk progresses, and as other walkers fall by the wayside, the reader learns more about the two of them and their problematic love lives. We are willing them to get together, to reach some kind of understanding that will see them triumph, ultimately, as a couple. But the course of true love, just like a coast-to-coast walk, does not run smoothly.

Romance isn’t really my thing but I loved this novel. I loved the characters of Michael and Marnie (and most of all, Marnie, who has a kick-ass sense of humour and pedantic eye for detail).

Nicholls’ writing is seemingly effortless and a joy to read. Tender moments are captured with humour and clarity. There are laugh out loud moments and I imagined myself picturing who might play the roles when it’s adapted into a television series like his best-known novel, One Day.

The new novel has so much hope at its core, following the desperation and isolation of the covid lockdowns. I thoroughly recommend it.

The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins (expected publication by The Borough Press, May 2024).

In 1870s London, widower Henry Latimer is working in his father-in-law’s shop selling hearing aids. A mysterious customer, who owns a silk factory in the Devon town of Telverton, asks Henry to help his young daughter who has been deaf since birth. Intrigued, Henry takes up his invitation. He travels to the man’s big house in Telverton and ends up getting caught in a web of deceit, greed and enchantment.

Henry’s story is interspersed with the first person journal of a previous lady of the house, whose sojourn on a Greek island results in the discovery of spiders which spin the most incredible silk. When worked into fabric, the spider silk has a unique property that can bring calming silence or excruciating madness to those exposed to it.

I was spellbound by this novel – more so because I wasn’t expecting to like it. I had read one of Collins’ previous novels, The Binding, which I was enjoying before it started to get weird. The Silence Factory, however, is streets ahead in its storytelling, quality of writing and characterisation. If you like gothic novels, you will love this. Prepare yourself for an immersive ride. It’s definitely got big screen potential written all over it, either as a film or television series. Highly recommended.

The Light of Experience

Today would have been my father’s ninety-ninth birthday.

He died in 2016, not long after he was ninety-one. It was a year my family won’t forget. We lost three close members in almost as many months.

It’s a sombre, sobering experience when that kind of thing happens. Makes you count your blessings for happier times and live for the day rather than dwelling in the past or worrying about the future.

My dad was a second generation tenant farmer from south Somerset, the middle of three sons. He was quiet, wiry and strong. He worked so hard it did his back in. He had an unbreakable connection to and affinity with the landscape, which he passed on to me and my four older siblings through osmosis.

We didn’t have many acres but he knew those fields like a dressmaker knows fabric and thread. Our small herd of Friesian cattle all had names – that was my mother’s doing, naming them after Native American tribes, exotic flowers and women from I Claudius.

He bred poultry – the rare breed Plymouth Barred Rocks, Barnevelders and Welsummers. His calves fetched top price at Taunton Market and he could spot a good heifer from a mile away.

My father was a prolific trickster, doing that thing people do with their thumbs, pretending to have sliced off the tip of his nose and then putting it back on again. He’d frighten me with spiders and challenge primary school friends to punch their way out of a paper bag by putting them into an animal feed sack.

He never went abroad until he retired, yet he hankered constantly for adventure. My mother told me that Dad had wanted to emigrate to Tasmania before I was born, but he never did. Too busy on the farm and with his growing family, I suppose. His younger brother was a Ten Pound Pom and emigrated to Australia in the 1960s, where their uncle had lived since the 1920s.

In the 1970s, my father somehow got the romantic notion that he wanted to be a tenant farmer in Ireland. During this period, he was an avid reader of the Irish Farmer magazine and the cow stalls hummed to the sound of Radio Athlone. But Ireland didn’t want him.

I’d forgotten this but my father was into world music before it was a thing. He loved The Chieftains (naturally, they were Irish) and the Romanian pan pipe player Gheorghe Zamfir, who came to prominence in the mid-1970s for the haunting theme to The Light of Experience, a BBC religious programme.

Gheorghe Zamfir in a video that could have come straight from The Fast Show.

Years before, I remember being in the kitchen at home and asking nobody in particular who it was that was playing Tom Hark on the radio.

Without hesitation, my father replied: ‘Elias and his Zig-Zag Jive Flutes.’

He was great at baking cakes. And his grandchildren will tell you that his egg and chips were the best we’ve ever tasted.

His shoes were the shiniest I’ve ever seen – ‘you can tell a lot from people’s shoes‘ – and he always wore a German belt that my grandfather had brought home from the First World War.

He loved the comedian Dave Allen (Irish again), boxing and Joan Bakewell.

Happy birthday, Dad.

A bit of a ding dong

The church bells are still silent in Lush Places.

Meanwhile, I’m in France where the church bells in our village chime the hour twice, every hour (it’s about to strike three o’clock and they’ll go dong, dong, dong. And then a break and then dong, dong, dong again).

But the bells here do shut up at night. However, during the day, at noon and at seven o’clock, they chime until they’re fit to burst, calling in the workers from the fields for lunch and evening meal respectively.

Last week, a former colleague reminded of a notice I’ve seen in many French villages, drawing outsiders’ attention to the perils of rural life.

This is the country where village signs up and down the land have been turned on their heads. This latest farmers’ protest alludes to having their own lives turned upside down by contradictory instructions. See the BBC story here.

I hope a solution can be found to the silencing of our village bells back in Dorset.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful if, in addition to the automatic hourly chiming being restored, a new team of bellringers steps forward to pull the ropes on Sundays and high days and holidays?

The bells aren’t rung on a Sunday at the moment because there’s no tower captain nor regular team of ringers.

It would be lovely if the positive outcome of the silence of the bells story was that volunteers joined forces for bellringing to happen once again.