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Thank you for downloading from our home correspondent from BBC Radio 4.

I'm Michelle Hussein and families and communities are what we're all about in this month's edition of the program.

One correspondent takes us to the cold... are what we're all about in this month's edition of the program.

One correspondent takes us to the coal face of his village newsletter in Oxfordshire

and what feels like a kinder, gentler form of journalism. How everything from fan mail to asking someone out on a date is possible

via a hand delivered letter at a Wiltshire Music Festival. And a tale of two families, one that's getting used to a new set of pronouns

for a child, and another with an extra empty place at the dinner table. We begin though with a time-honored seasonal ritual

this one with the West Country's apple harvest at its core

as it were.

When the bounty of the trees is turned into cider, the process is a feast for all the senses,

as the poet Julian May's been discovering in rural Somerset.

Someone told me, make sure a rainbow goes into your cider barrel, says Matthew Bryant, plucking

bright windfalls out of the grass and filling his bucket. Varieties of cider apple are legion and they come in all hues, red,

russet, yellow, green streaked with orange. We're in the Somerset Village of Hazelbury Plucknet, long renowned for its orchards and the quality of its cider.

But since the 1950s, Britain has lost 90% of its traditional orchards to neglect industrial farming and development.

So seven years ago the villages of Hazelbury Plutnet planted a typical Somerset orchard,

35 cider apple trees, all old varieties that originated within 35 miles of the village.

Kingston Black, Dunkerton Late, Hangy Down, their names are as gorgeous as their rainbow colours.

Sweet Crimson King, hoary morning, Slack me girdle.

We carry sacks of apples to Matthew's home. Slack me girdle.

We carry sacks of apples to Matthew's home.

...