The challenge was to paint a word picture based on a postcard - then show the picture so that the audience could judge how effective the description had been. After reading the piece, click the link and judge for yourself.

Miss Marple's village

Miss Marple could have lived in one of these honey coloured cottages, sipping her tea as she looked across to the low, three arched bridge with its footings of tousled grass and reeds. Gazing out of a stone mullioned window, could she have seen the white church tower as it reached among the trees, its spire at one corner pointing upwards like an index finger? Obviously not, because St Mary Mead was fiction. But this picturesque village might have been its inspiration. Imagine the benevolent sleuth pottering among the ornate planters, trimming the creepers beside the stone tiled gable porch of the first cottage. The soft crunching of her shoes on the gravel sidewalk intensifies the quietness of a lazy afternoon. Watch her strolling along the streamside lane in front of the grey roofed cottages, ready to soak up local gossip at the village stores and alert for clues about the latest murder. On hot summer days she could cross the gravel to stand on the grass atop the grey stone clad bank to feed ducks in the quietly rippling trout stream. Tall trees provide a leafy rim to the valley bowl which protects this most perfect of villages. The hamlet has an olde world charm that knows nothing of telegraph poles and electricity pylons and surely knows little of motor cars. Fortunately it does know photography as this entrancing picture testifies. Did the photographer have to stand in the stream to create the base line of this pictorial triangle? With bridge, church and trees framing the left side, and stream bank, gravel lane and cottages giving shape to the right he has captured an ageless image of Cotswold beauty.

©Derrick Phillips
June 2001