THANK you for so many wonderful responses to last week's column on how I met my wife Stacy. One of my neighbours, Vicky, popped around with a card to say how much the story had touched her.

It reminded me how nice it is to live in a community that really cares. Vicky celebrated her 80-something birthday last week. She is from a generation where people looked out for each other. It's sad to hear that neighbourly attitudes are changing.

CEREMONY: Jon Reed, town crier for Topsham

According to new research, more than a quarter of people claim not to trust the people living next door anymore and nearly two thirds never socialise with their neighbours, while 43 per cent of neighbours admitted to regularly prying.

This week those other 'Neighbours', the TV show that launched the careers of Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, aired its 6,000th episode in Australia. That's 125 days of continuous viewing.

Regular readers of this column know I am not a fan of soaps or reality shows. And I'm not alone. We discovered this week that Big Brother is the show most people strive to avoid. Only two per cent wanted more celebrity content and just three per cent wanted further reality TV. Give me a good whodunit. By the way, you'd be mad to invite that Poirot to dinner!

We chose the bank holiday to not watch TV, but go for long walks instead, and happened upon a hedgehog doing the same in Countess Wear. Stacy had never seen one before that wasn't on a computer or called 'Sonic'. It was struggling to keep up so we gave him a lift to the nearby hedgerow before continuing on our walk to Topsham. There we watched the ceremony to find the new town crier.

This week we heard that more than 10,000 cases of breast and bowel cancer could be prevented each year if people took more exercise such as a 30-minute brisk walk, five days a week. Sunday we headed to Castle Drogo to walk down the footpath into the valley and to Fingle Glen in time for a coffee and to watch a red Land Rover scrape its side along the narrow bridge wall. Good times!

So get on your hiking boots and join us on the health trail. Ciao.