There is something very special about an English village church when it is decorated for Harvest Festival.
Those beautifully rich, autumnal colours. The smell of apples and chrysanthemums from gardens and allotments. The glorious morning light coming in through the latticed windows.
When the congregation sings Come Ye Thankful People Come (even a congregation as small as the one at our church yesterday), you get a sense of the people who have been singing this harvest hymn for generations: the farmers, the farmworkers, the ploughmen, the hedgelayers, the planters, the haymakers, the dairy men and women bringing in the cows, doing the milking and churning the butter.
After the service, we pulled the tables up to the chancel to enjoy food brought to share, thankful for what we had and mindful of those who have not.
We think we are so sophisticated but nothing much has changed. Here in rural Dorset, poverty is not just a thing of the past. It’s with us still.
Up on the hill this morning, there is a stillness in the trees. I look out on the view across farmland and also to the sea.
I’m not a Royalist. But the Queen has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.
I recall her image on a postage stamp in the 1960s. She looked so much like my godmother, my next-door-neighbour Mrs Thomas, who I called Mosses. I was so young, I couldn’t say Mrs Thomas.
I remembered saying to Mosses: ‘That lady on the stamp, she looks like you.’
Mosses was impressed. The Queen was the epitome of elegance, grace and duty. It was a big compliment. (I’ve lost touch with Mosses. She moved to a tenant farm on the Somerset Levels and I have no idea what happened to her.)
The Queen has been a part of my life, a part of all my friends’ and family’s lives, for all our lives.
My mother is 96 and is as quietly wise and remarkable as the Queen, in a Westcountry, tenant farmer kind of way.
Along with everything that that has happened in recent times, including a personal family meltdown in 2016 when anyone of any importance died, then Brexit, the worldwide pandemic and the war in Europe, this is a real changing of the guard.
The Queen – and we – were prepared for it. Now we have to move on and make the best of everything, and agitate for all that is good for the planet.
I wish the new King Charles the best of bloody luck. He’s been a Green advocate for much longer than has been fashionable. And one to challenge the international politics of the day, to the greater good, methinks.
I’m a bit of a Diana fan (same age, used to be compared etc, although I’m still not a Royalist) but King Charles III has his heart in the right place.
So God bless the Queen and long live the King.
May we live in interesting times. Let’s move forward, maybe tentatively, but united in positivity.
Abbotsbury Gardens Illuminate: a magical, annual happening when this subtropical paradise is subtly floodlit from the ground, turning the landscape into something from a fantasy film or a magic mushroom trip. New blog post.
It’s the Winter Solstice today – the Shortest Day.
I was before the sunrise but it was disappointing in the grey gloom. Never mind, I’ll go up the hill with Ruby another day.
With just days before Christmas, I took the opportunity last night to visit Abbotsbury Gardens while they’re still illuminated. The event, which runs until 23 December, is now sold out.
This magical, annual happening sees this subtropical paradise subtly floodlit from the ground, turning the landscape into something from a fantasy film or a magic mushroom trip.
I didn’t take Ruby, I left her home in the warm, although plenty of other people took their dogs. She’s such a puller on the lead, I wanted to enjoy the lights at a leisurely pace and soak up the atmosphere.
So I took Mr Grigg and the littlest granddaughter instead who, at eight years old, believes in magic as much as I do.
Having booked our tickets in advance, we headed along the coast road between Bridport and Abbotsbury. In the light, this is one of the most beautiful routes I know. But it was dark and the first bit of beauty hit us when we descended the steep Abbotsbury Hill and glimpsed pink and fluorescent green trees in the valley below.
Car parking spaces were at a premium – it seems everyone else had the same idea – but once we were inside we just followed the trail and gazed at the wonderland around us, the birds gaily trilling as if they didn’t know their Christmas from their Easter.
It’s probably my age but I’m sick and fed up with seeing on pub and restaurant menus home made burgers in a brioche bun.
When did that become a thing? A burger in a sweet bun? What’s that all about?
Call me a pleb but give me a burger in a bap any day, with lashings of fried onions and tomato sauce, like the ones you used to get at the funfair. Back in the days when brioche had never been heard of this side of the Channel.
Honestly, some of the descriptions on menus are so pretentious, with a price tag to match. And don’t get me started on places that make you pay extra for vegetables. It’s an instant boycott from me.
The reason I’m telling you this is that we’ve just come back from a night away in West Somerset. Dinner, accommodation and service at the hotel was great, particularly as it was part of a fabulous Travel Zoo deal booked to coincide with my Masters result.
It was either going to be a celebration or commiseration. Two years’ studying creative writing with The Open University deserved to be marked, whatever the result. As it was, I passed with a merit. I was happy about this but cross I hadn’t matched the distinction I achieved in the first year.
Still, I now have a collection of short stories just sitting there, ready to be honed.
The burger in the brioche bun thing came about while we were in a cafe-cum-gift shop in the seaside town of Watchet. Sitting at a table, surrounded by peg boards and feeling like I’d gone back in time to the 1970s, the man at the shop till popped around to the kitchen to cook all-day breakfasts to order.
We’d only come in for a coffee but we perused the laminated single sheet of A4 menu in any case. Everything on it was ordinary, wholesome and incredibly reasonably priced.
And not a burger in a brioche bun in sight.
Later, we walked along the harbourside, soaking up the history of this little port, where Samuel Taylor Coleridge was inspired to write The Ancient Mariner. We gazed out across the grey water to the Welsh coast and the islands of Flat Holm and Steep Holm in the Bristol Channel.
And then we strolled down to the beach to let Ruby run wild and free.
I was very taken with the place. It’s big enough to be a town but small enough to be a community.
And then, the next day, we went down to Kilve Beach, which I had last visited in 1978 on a geology field trip. Beautiful, wild, very special and full of ammonites. No sign of burgers in brioche buns, ice cream kiosks or amusement arcades. Just bottles of fresh apple juice by a kissing gate and an honesty box for your money.
Driving back across the Quantocks, the trees still in their autumn coats but not for long, I began to think ‘Ooh, I could live here.’ Which is always fatal.
The last time I did that we ended up living in Corfu for a year.
Maddie Grigg 