Göttingen

Merlin, a 14-year-old from Göttingen, has been with us this week, part of a group on a half-term twinning deal. We were to have had a second boy, but he cried off at the last moment through illness - which meant that Merlin had to work that much harder on his English.

He wasn't missing anything, he said, being away from home on Halloween. All the action takes place on St Martin's Day, when children process from house to house with colourful paper lanterns made in school, sing a song - the last line of each verse is "Rabimmel, rabammel, rabum" - and get sweets in return. No trickery required. (I have since discovered that the lantern procession symbolises the light that holiness brings to the darkness, just as St Martin brought hope to the poor through his good deeds.)

Merlin's father is Martin (too).

The book Sarah kindly gave me last Christmas tells us that Göttingen "has nurtured 40 Nobel Prize winners". Compared to how many from Cheltenham I was wondering.

Transition Town Cheltenham

I photographed this "Compassion" rose a month ago, and it's still blooming merrily, as it has been since the end of May - not just on and off, but continuously, or so it seems. Moreover, the raspberries are also still worth picking, just: we don't often have those till so late in the year. Certainly we have a mild spell just now: I've been planting broad beans today, without a coat on. St Martin's Little Summer?

This evening, I have been at the newly-refurbished Footsteps Café, watching some of the films made by our local Transition group, including the one about the edible garden just off the London Road: it has won prizes, I was pleased to learn, and there are plans to expand it for the 2013 season.

Corduroy etc.

An email came in overnight from Canadian cousins, who go to great lengths, it seems, to commemorate Armistice Day. Good for them. It's easy to forget. Today's picture combines the red and black of my poppy - in verticals, to mark, in addition, the moment of the day that most resembles corduroy, as the clock moves from 11:11:11:11:00:00 to 11:11:11:11:11.11.

It was three years ago that the Guardian offered readers the chance to download an original Keith Tyson History Picture. This is "mine". Each work consists of a unique randomly-generated sequence of vertical stripes in red, black and green - the roulette colours. Every image has its own title, based on the geographical location of the user: hence "Cheltenham" at the bottom left.

Ahead of the offer, Keith wrote that his computer "will generate a sequence of the numbers one to 32 which relates to the roulette wheel. Each number has an assigned colour. If you hit the jackpot, you'll come away with an entirely green work. But the chances of that happening are 1 in 37 x 37 x 37, 49 times." Even I, who am red/green colour-blind, can see this is not a jackpot that I've won. But the consolations are that Caroline remembered it's St Martin's Day, and I've been asked out to lunch by an old friend!