A chaotic Cornish comedy - with serious undertones, in which two villages have been feuding for centuries. All change when divine intervention triggered by tractor-driver Bill Burt, playing Polfellet church organ, solves not only social and economic problems, but also leads to illicit romance in other social circles. Heroines and villains in this modern fairy tale are three women, Wiffy, Tink and Plonker, school-mates since posh prep school in Par, and later at Cheltenham Ladies'. The men in the story, including Lord Oswald Kitchener ('Oz'), Admiral Nicholas Beddington (RN Retired) and Gervase Hetherington-Blythe (pronounced 'Hithe') all dance to the tunes of these sirens - and to a couple of others including the formidable Cynthia Heddington, the Admiral's socialite wife, and Heidi Schmidt, who works at Aldi in Liskeard. Landowners Oz and Gervase, like many with property on Bodmin Moor, have a bracken problem, while climate change presents new hazards to them and their land, which, from the air, looks like The Somme in 1917, due to frantic mining and prospecting in days gone by. Some ingenious solutions emerge with national and indeed global, benefit. None of this will be forgotten, especially every August, when this part of East Cornwall, from now on, will reverberate with church bells and bagpipes.
About the Author: Award-winning writer and journalist George A Macpherson was educated at St Paul's School, London and Seale Hayne Agricultural College (now the University of Plymouth). He worked for the United Nations' International Labour Organisation in Africa as a technical advisor on appropriate technology before joining BBC World Service, as a producer in the Science Unit, later becoming Programme Organiser of the Swahili Service. Leaving BBC staff to become editor of a monthly farming magazine, he continued his broadcasting on a freelance basis, on radio and television, before going fully independent, starting his own daily rural news service on the internet for the Farming Online website. He continued presenting and producing farming and wildlife, medical and musical programmes for BBC World Service, BBC Five Live and BBC Radio Four before moving with his wife Jane, to France to write novels. In his spare time he learns the cello and takes part in local musical activities. George and his wife, Jane, have a large, rainbow family. While working in UK George was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Society; Fellow of the British Institute of Management; and an Honorary Associate of the British Veterinary Association. He and his wife live on Exmoor, on the Somerset/Devon border in SW England.