SOMERSET is undergoing a continental drift unseen in Glastonbury’s mystical mists. The naming of America has something to do with a county camel, and throughout our rural idyll, strange grass grows as high as an elephant’s eye, whilst sheep get inferiority complexes from alpacas. Even woolly pigs are now out there. Within our towns, pubs are being replaced by coffee bars and barmaids morph into baristas. Without spelling it out, surely this cannot be legal. And such is the cost of food, a security van might be a better option than plastic bags to carry our groceries home. Indeed, these are times of change.

From upon high church towers the hunky punks are screaming.Yet, the owls still hoot, dormice snooze, and badgers bulldoze. Spiders remain the webmasters and deer always taste nice. As ever, dumbledores sting, river trout are ticklish, sea fishing is pollocks, fezzies are daft, and grockles flummoxed.

Through snow siege, by way of primrose and purple heather, to cidrous apple press, local history, like many a burrowing creature, is always there for unearthing, with opportunities arising to put a few things straight.

In this sequel to his bestseller, How to Survive in Somerset, Charles Wood ‘desnuglifies’ himself from beneath a Wiveliscombe duvet to rediscover that beyond his warped blue front door the English county he loves is still alive and kicking.And not only a rugby ball, boundary rope or cottage cat. Friends, such as Hairy John and the maker of daisy brandy, are well met again while others are introduced. And, the puggle ‘eaded bibblers in the ‘Bearin’ Up’ never cease to gossip. All, like the author, are just surviving another Somerset year.

Illustrated by the author.

Charles Wood gave up the legal profession, and the stress of work in Libya and Hong Kong, yearning for the artistic life. For the past twenty years he has just about managed to avoid wearing a tie to work or getting grubby. Instead he has preferred to eke out an existence in the Somerset custom of self-employment. As a self-taught documentary filmmaker he has made over thirty films. His ‘Somerset the Summerland’ and ‘Exmoor – An English Wild Kingdom’ sold in their thousands finding their way into many a Somerset and grockle home. His film ‘Dragons – the Story of a Country Parson’ was broadcast on HTV in 1999. And in 2005 he was the first Englishman to win a documentary film award in the Republic of Moldova. Charles has also found time to be full time Dad of four, a writer of fairy tales, an illustrator, a part-time college lecturer, a part-time school teacher, an occasional broadcaster on BBC Somerset Sound, a cameraman forWestcountry television news and have a heart transplant. He now admits to an enjoyment of poddling through the lighter side of life’s rich tapestry, relieved that he has never been bankrupt.

Imprint: Halsgrove. ISBN 978 1 84114 967 7, hardback, 216x138mm, 160 pages. Published October 2009.

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