This week is the second anniversary of me taking on a paper round. It’s also two years since I moved into this house.

When you move to a new place you expect to inherit hedgehogs on the patio, a quaint ghost in the attic or a little rising damp, but no-one mentioned that delivery commitments came with this particular plot.

As the removal truck pulled away, a valued villager and local distributor popped by with a new home card and instructions on my patch for the monthly community news.

The Bell and Mitre may sound like a lovely rural hostelry selling smoky ales and fruit wines across a hop-laden bar, but it’s just part of this week’s Kingston Bagpuize entertainment.

Picture, like something from Cluedo, the Bishop in the Tower and the MP in the cherry picker: last Friday, Ed Vaizey and The Rt Rev John Pritchard of Oxford rose celestially while choral backing singers belted out You Raise Me Up in an appeal for funds to rain into the coffers for roof repairs.

I moved here from just beyond the parish boundary, and one of the things I liked about it was that it was slap bang in the centre of the village.

The great thing for the children was that they would have all their friends on the doorstep. And they do, literally.

They fill the house and garden too. As the evenings lengthen, so do the impromptu queues at my kitchen table when dinner time approaches. It’s amazing the lengths to which you can stretch chicken casserole with rice, as long as no-one expects to actually see any chicken.

I also have an open-door policy with the other village mums (as long as they shut it behind them to keep the heat in).

They’re true friends because they come round even though they know I’ll have eaten all the biscuits before they arrive.

I was already known to the neighbours before my arrival. Even so, they can’t have been expecting my transfer to the estate to be heralded by a troupe of women parading a giant trampoline a mile down the high street and depositing it in the front garden where it waited patiently for the strength and height of weekending men to lift it over the side fence into the back.

And although tricky to coordinate, it was easier than the rebuilding of 7,552 rusty pieces, however many locals, MPs and bishops were on offer with heavy-duty DIY skills and Tetris know-how.

I’m sure that, while the trampoline was still on the drive, the street was steeling itself for 20 years of old vans on bricks and rotting white goods but hopefully I’ve redeemed myself since with key local newsflashes.

Have you heard about the Kingston Bagpuize Bell Tower Timbers appeal?