Festival time...

Welcome to the season of mists and yellow fruitfulness, and our September edition. This will indeed be a month of fruitfulness at Melbourne Festival, whose 2017 theme is the village's rich heritage in market gardening. We can't wait to see what the hundreds of artists exhibiting in the festival have come up with this year.

Our centre spread this month very much ties in with this year's festival theme, being our coverage of the first ever Melbourne Produce Show. And if it isn't the first ever, no-one can remember the last one. This was a wonderful event down at the Senior Citizens Centre, very well supported by the community, and we hope to see many more. Still on a rural theme, our photographer and co-founder Andrew Jackson was on hand to capture the 17th annual ploughing competition held on fields near Melbourne by Ashby Young Farmers, all in aid of the local air ambulance. His pictures give a really atmospheric feel for a farming practice that has been going on a long time, albeit with different equipment!

On our front page we bring you news of the sentencing of a burglar who carried out two crimes in Melbourne - in one of which he actually relieved a 96 year old lady of the rings from her fingers. He has been handed three years for a string of incidents.

We hope there's plenty to keep our readers interested within our pages, with Frank Hughes' report of local GCSE and A-level results at Chellaston Academy, plus the tale of when Radio Derby's famous red sofa parked itself in Melbourne for the morning. Frank has also caught up with Melbourne’s latest man of the cloth, Steve Blackaby, who is now at Melbourne Baptist Church and warmly welcomed to the village. Also new to the area is the new landlord at the much-loved Chequers Inn in Ticknall, Tony Matthews, who joins the pub from his previous home in Lincolnshire.

We bring you exciting developments at Tori & Ben's farm, which is opening up a new premises at Chantry Farm Shop, with the culinary help of one of the contestants from Masterchef: The Professionals, while also entering an agreement with Natural England to restore 35 hectares of fields into ancient parkland. We very much look forward to seeing the results of both of those enterprises.

In sporting news, the tennis club continues to do very well with the men’s side winning their first silverware in nearly ten years, and the ladies’ side continuing their barnstorming form. Best of luck to them.

On a final note, we would like to wish all of the new school and university starters all the very best in their new paths, and all our readers a great month.

The Village Voice