nature – Maddie Grigg

The title of my new novel, Plashy Fen, came to me in the middle of the night a few years ago.

I wasn’t happy with the working title I’d given it, as who the hell did I think I was, calling it Dylan’s Wake, in a nod to the author of the wonderful Under Milk Wood, which is one of my favourite books.

And anyway, early beta readers told me they thought it was going to be about the funeral party of someone called Dylan.

I’ve been writing a column for The People’s Friend for over a decade now, after the then editor emailed me out of the blue telling me she’d seen my blog, The World From My Window, and would I like to write for the magazine?

She said (and it’s etched in my mind): ‘I think you might just be the writer we’ve been looking for! I like your ability to write with humour about the minutiae of daily life, but with a touch of emotional depth, too.’

So I introduced my village to Friend readers as Lush Places, named after the fictional newspaper column by the hapless and fictional nature writer William Boot, who, through a case of mistaken identity, becomes a war correspondent for The Daily Beast.

Boot is the main character in Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, which was published in 1938. It’s dated now and very politically incorrect but I loved the juxtaposition of a naïve, gentle writer in the cut-and-thrust world of horrid Fleet Street hacks out to make a name for themselves in a forgotten corner of the world.

I was redrafting my latest novel about Lush Places’s seaside sibling when the new village’s name – and book title – came to me during the early hours of the morning.

There is a line in one of Boot’s nature columns – ‘feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’ – which has come to signify an affected style when it comes to nature writing.

I guess the the term plashy fen must have stuck with me. It’s become a bit of a personal joke and serves the purpose of making me check my prose style every now to make sure I’m not coming across as a complete jerk.

So that’s the story of how Plashy Fen got its name.

But the characters, well, they’re a different story…

The internet today is full of solar eclipse photographs.

Some of the best I’ve seen are not of the sun being eaten by the moon but the mottled crescent-shaped shadows created in the streets, in bedrooms and on furniture.

Here in south west France, we had a great view from the village boulodrome. Folk brought along food to share. Word had clearly got around that this was a good spot. Various groups, mostly French, sat in chairs and on picnic rugs to enjoy the spectacle.

When it came, the special eclipse glasses made it an incredible experience.

There were others using welding masks and goggles, as well as pinhole cameras made out of boxes.

I managed to get the shot below by holding my eclipse glasses over the camera on my phone, early on in the process. Not the best image, but you get the picture.

Unlike in 1999, when the UK had a total eclipse, this one was only partial – about ninety seven or eight per cent for us.

It was humbling to appreciate the sun’s mighty force, even when its battery is drained to the last few percent.

It went a bit darker, but not like in 1999 when the eclipse was in the middle of the day rather than at sunset.

The streetlights didn’t come on this time, nor did the birds suddenly go quiet after coming into roost.

Still, it was shared experience and people in various countries enjoyed this natural phenomenon. Truly awesome, in the absolutely real sense of the word.

Sunset itself was pretty wonderful, too.

And then -much, much later – it wa the turn of the Perseids meteor shower, which was ‘like a movie’ according to one of my friends who just happened to wake at two-thirty in the morning and remembered to go outside and look at the sky.

We saw several shooting stars before we went to bed, but also so many fast-moving satellites, which were never really a part of the night sky when I was a young child in the 1960s.

Anyway, thank you, Sun and Moon, for forgetting your differences and coming together for such a spectacular occasion.

I’m off for a sleep now.

Speak soon.

Love, Maddie x