Dorset has been on my mind all week. I had three extraordinary days in Weymouth at the beginning of the week. There is something other about that county. Let's be clear here: there's something different about most of the West Country generally; less conventional, more magical, in the sense (and this is what I feel about Wales very powerfully) that rounding a corner and seeing a hobbit casually smoking a long briar pipe, or catching a glimpse of a unicorn through the steam of an early morning just would n't feel odd.

It has it's own peculiar, and by this I mean engaging and attractive, sensibility, which though is too elusive to pin to a board  - it's a mood: a felt perception, a little bohemian, a little new wave artisan, a little Eco flavour, a touch reflective, and elemental. People are out on boats, fishing, or walking the mudflats, or fully absorbed as I saw one person was, chipping away with a geologist's hammer on Monmouth beach just outside Lyme Regis.

The Dorset folk (and does n't that pong of anthropology, even condescension, but it's not meant like that) are n't hermetically sealed in, they talk to everyone. Sometimes it struck me as almost with an ingenue's naïveté; thirty years of strap hanging on a tube every morning makes a Londoner like me oddly unprepared for casual conversation. Not so people from Dorset.

Elemental is the right adjective, for the weather as much as a characteristic of the people. I experienced the coldest weather I've ever known anywhere on the UK mainland. A wind that had been sharpened to a scalpel on the whetstone, flew in over a rumbustious sea, flung itself across every nook and cranny, down every street, up every hill, and tore through to my very marrow. The recorded temperature was never much higher than -1c, windchill must have pushed that down even further.

Sunday we thrashed by rain and Monday by snow, but nature's plays many tunes simultaneously, as on Tuesday, quite incredibly, I saw four Spoonbills - long-legged, spatulate beaked waders - sheltering in the still buffeting wind at the RSPB's Lodmoor reserve. This is the type of bird that always comes to mind when I think of the Okavango delta; birds for a hot, vast, sultry, treeless landscape,  not reed marshland backing on to a Weymouth housing estate with elderly dog walkers and young mums criss  crossing.

The evening before I ended up marooned with a handful of other passengers on a double decker bus for almost four hours outside Bridport due to police investigating an accident between a heavy lorry and a teenage boy on a bike. We eventually decanted from that bus, walked through the accident scene to board another; this was the moment I realised the filtering power of ambient light pollution, you never see the night sky properly in London, here it was squid ink black and almost touchable.

I know I'll be going back to Dorset. It's pulling me there.