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Morris gets chased out of Athens and heads for the hills in the latest instalment... but not before he becomes a published author (Seriously!).

I spent today in quite an upmarket area of Athens, full of very fashionable-looking young people.

A lot of them had the labels hanging out of their clothes. I tried to be helpful and tuck a few of them in, but it turns out they buy the clothes with the labels deliberately showing on the outside. Madness.

To try and fit in I pulled out the tag on my jumper and proudly displayed my "Ethel Austins" label for all to see.

I saw one lady wearing a chain mail poncho with pink pixie boots and what looked like a scale model of a combine harvester perched on her head.

...Another spiky-haired lady was wearing the shortest of checked skirts with no vest and a blouse open to the navel... Meanwhile I also spotted a middle aged man wearing a milk white suit, with a rolled up jacket, a t-shirt and cowboy boots.

It's like another planet!

In Moreton Say it's considered a fashion risk to wear a jumper over a shirt and tie, so I'll admit they do seem a little more adventurous here.

A group of young men passed me, all wearing matching jackets.

I naturally presumed they were an Olympic team enjoying a post Olympic jaunt around Athens.

But the way they pushed me to the ground, stole my tupperware box full of Shropshire soil and were swiftly pursued by some Greek policemen made me suspect they were not official Olympic representatives. They should have been though, they were jolly fast.

They clearly didn't realise the true value of my tupperware container and discarded the box a little way up the street. It was easily recovered.

I noticed that even the Greek policemen are victims of fashion - their uniforms were clearly augmented with badges, scarves and I'm sure one of them had little bells on his ankles.

Hardly anyone in Athens wears stout walking boots, cotton trousers, button down collar shirt, sensible jumper and waterproof coat finished off with the visual flair of a nice scarf.

Hardly anyone but me that is.

I am quite warm.

I might have missed the Olympics, but they are still holding the Paralympics. They play Basketball with wheelchairs apparently... although how on earth they get the wheelchair through that hoop I don't know.

By convincing some local officials that I am part of the Shropshire Paralympic team, I've managed to get access to this Olympic village, where all the athletes and Olympic staff and officials live while the games are going on.

To get in, I told them I was a colour blind synchronised swimmer. They weren't convinced at first, but I put a peg on my nose, smiled and told him what a lovely shade of blue his green uniform was... that seemed to do the trick.

I've arranged a little table in the middle of one of the busiest communal areas and I'm setting people straight about where the Olympics originated.

A few of the native Grecians got a little shirty when I dropped the Much Wenlock bombshell. I explained to them at length how they are in good company.

The majority of Western civilisation claims to have come up with things that clearly originated in Shropshire... they didn't find this of much comfort.

There's a big sign on the way into the Olympic village that says "Athens 2004 Olympic Games - Welcome Home". I took the liberty of amending the sign slightly.

In the interests of accuracy, I spray painted over the "Welcome Home" and wrote "still copying Much Wenlock". Generally I wouldn't condone graffiti, but this was not only art, it was educational, so I felt an exception was justified.

The Olympic village is going to be used as low income housing after the games have all finished, and they have done a spectacular job of capturing that whole "low income housing" look and feel.

It has all the sparkle and verve of a concentration camp.

Still, the people here are lovely. I have nothing but admiration for the Paralympians, although I've noticed a lot of them seem to be disabled.

The Paralympics, of course, also originated in Shropshire. A neurologist called Dr Ludwig Guttman was visiting a war veterans hospital in Shrewsbury, doing research on spinal chord injuries when he met the Salopian sporting legend "Three Legs" Anderson.

I've heard from reputable sources that Anderson, although he lost both legs, both arms and a fair proportion of his head during the Second World War, fashioned a rudimentary exoskeleton using only a soldering iron held in his mouth.

He then went on to win the Shewsbury marathon, the Shewsbury archery finals, the Shrewsbury Heavyweight boxing title, the Shrewsbury Open Tennis Championship and the all-counties Watercolour Challenge.

Inspired by Anderson's athletic prowess in the face of adversity, Dr Guttman set up a series of competitions between sports clubs and hospitals to coincide with the 1948 Olympic Games.

Anderson won in every event that year, then announced his retirement as undefeated champion and bought a pub in Telford.

After that, Dr Guttman opened up the competitions to include not only the spinally injured, but all other types of disability too... and so the seeds of the modern Paralympic Games were sown, as is often the case, in the fertile soils of Shropshire.

Ask some of the locals at the "Third Leg" in Telford and they'll tell you about the old landlord who could pull pints while he walked across the ceiling using his cybernetic exoskeleton.

Another day with my little table in the middle of the Olympic Village.

I'm getting to know some of the residents quite well now. A few of them have even stopped going around the back of the bushes and through the pond to avoid me and a very special few have started talking to me.

I'm not sure I'm really getting across to them just how important Shropshire is.

The Chinese team in particular found it hard to grasp exactly why they had to leave China and move to Shropshire.

Although a couple of them were quite keen to leave China, they didn't (despite all my talk of badgers and flowers and village communities and bingo and rolling hills) really grasp the significance of it all. They just kept telling me how nice it sounds, and how they must visit it sometime.

Sometime is no good is it?!

I'm not doing this to increase tourism, or make vague platitudes about how generally nice some places are.

I'm telling people that this is where they must go, right now, this moment, before they get sucked back in to the mundane shadow of an existence they are suffering outside the hallowed confines of Shropshire.

Living somewhere like Athens, with its dusty ruins, blistering heat and inferior selection of flora and fauna, they merely exist.

They are empty shells living empty lives.

They're like cream doughnuts without the cream; like a ball pool without the balls; like a book without pages; a jaffacake without the orangey bit.

The problem is, if you'd never seen a jaffacake, and you found one that had no orangey bit, you may well mistakenly think it was a nice choccy treat and all was well with it... not knowing the new levels of tasty goodness that could be experienced by the addition of some tangy jelly stuff in the correct place.

People are like that with Shropshire. They think they are happy; they just don't know how much happier they could be because they've never been to Shropshire.

They need showing and if that means forcibly taking away their jaffacake so I can stuff some orange jelly into it, then so be it.

I lost my tupperware box of Shropshire earth today.

The last time I saw it was on my display table in the Olympic Village. I was letting one of the blind cyclists feel the quality of the soil.

I left the table briefly to chase after a linesman who had suggested Shropshire was colder than Greece and when I returned it was gone.

I tried lost property, who were initially quite helpful, but they lost interest when it came to writing down my description of the missing item on the lost property form.

We used to have a lost property room in the company I used to work for in Shropshire. It was a veritable Aladdin's cave with accumulated falderal and discarded valuables stacked up against every wall.

There were coats, walking sticks, shoes, sporting implements signed by famous sportspersons, Hollywood props and memorabilia, shoeboxes full of tiny twisted skeletons, shrunken heads, old vinyl records, illegal musical instruments, rusty drums of radioactive waste, sarcophagi, cuddly toys, ancient iron-hinged boxes covered in runic symbols and of course the obligatory stuffed bear wearing a fez.

It was a very large lost property office

It was run by a little goblin of a man called Mr Parry, who looked like he'd been built out of clay by an 8 year old.

Mr Parry always seemed to be of the opinion that anything handed into Lost Property automatically became his property.

If you lost a hat or an umbrella and went to lost property to reclaim it, he'd take a scraping of skin and then ask you to come back once the DNA analysis was complete.

I don't think for a moment he actually had the ability to do any DNA analysing. Especially since my results came back negative for three umbrellas, four hats, two scarves, five bingo markers, two staplers and a small oak treasure chest possibly dating back to the Spanish Armada... and I'm certain most of them were mine.

I remember once Mr Parry lost the key to the lost property room and I jokingly asked if he'd checked to see if it had been handed into lost property. He attacked me with a cricket bat signed by W.G. Grace.

It was quite an honour.

I've been asked to leave the village this afternoon. It turns out there is no synchronised swimming event in the Paralympic Games, but it's taken a few days for the guards to confirm this and then find me again.

My four days here have not been wasted.

The Paralympian friends I've made here were all sad to see me go, but both of them promised to come visit Shropshire, especially after I told them about the excellent disabled access to the cafe facilities in Market Drayton.

I've been astounded by the good humour of the athletes here.

They were often laughing in my company, usually when I was not intentionally being amusing. But laughter is the theme tune of Shropshire, the national anthem of Market Drayton and the catchy jingle of Moreton Say, so I don't mind.

I just want people to be happy.

I left Athens and walked until it was dark, to see where the muse of circumstance would take me.

They don't have nearly enough lampposts in Greece. If it wasn't for the torch I duct taped to my hat, I would have found myself immediately and quite terribly lost, the moment night fell on the unfamiliar back roads.

As it was, the torch proved invaluable and it took several hours before I well and truly had no idea where I was.

I'm sleeping under a Grecian fruit-bearing bush of some sort, possibly figs or dates, but it's hard to tell by starlight. To be honest it would be hard to tell by daylight. I generally identify unfamiliar fruits by reading what it says on the packaging.

It's surprisingly cold outdoors at nightime here.

I miss my box of Shropshire soil.

I used to sniff it at night to help me sleep. Now all I have to sniff are unfamiliar fruits. They smell sweet and new, but not nearly as sweet and new as Mother Shropshire's fine and crumbly earth.

If I close my eyes and try really hard I can still imagine what it's like to lie down in the gentle arms of a Moreton Say field, the dancing insects zzzzing past, the morning sunlight licking my face and my Mother calling from the house "Morris, your egg and soldiers are readyÂ…Â…"

I miss my box of Shropshire soil. I miss Shropshire.