Farewell to Brittany

Bidding goodbye to our musical hosts at Keranot, we biked off this morning in no great haste back to Roscoff, sticking to the roads which abound. This tractor driver assumed we were lost when I paused to photograph him and his two colleagues, planting cabbages in nifty fashion. The fields all grow vegetables in this Léonard land.

Around Northleach

As last Wednesday, the forecast was rain for this morning. Happily, it didn't materialise, and the five of us who set out to walk in a gentle anti-clockwise circle from Northleach stayed dry. Not only did the rain hold off, it was warm and intermittently sunny, as can be seen from my photograph, taken as we came back down into the Leach valley, looking forward to lunch.

We ate at the Sherborne Arms, our peace being interrupted by some continuous high-pitched barking a couple of tables away: the temptation to order a dog roll was hard to resist. By Winterwell Barn we had spotted rather more useful specimens of that ilk - four sheep dogs and a spaniel in the front of a pickup, overlooking (in the back) five sheep - a high pupil:teacher ratio.

Earlier, we chatted with the lone Stowell Park tractor man: born in nearby Withington in a bygone era, his CaseIH Steiger 485QT Quadtrac GPS-guided machine is a monster. Elsewhere than the Cotswolds, you could buy a house for what one costs. Weighing 24 tonnes and consuming 100 litres of fuel per hour, this vehicle is not something you look forward to meeting coming towards you on a country lane.

And a far cry from green economics: the other tractor man was "transitioned" when it arrived.

Before I left for Northleach, we had the Today programme on Radio 4. The Thought for the Day presenter was well upstaged by Celestina Mba an hour later, interviewed by Justin Webb.

Merton Council employed Celestina to work with needy children. At her interview, she had said she could not work on Sundays, as she was a Christian. "We can work around that," she was told, and was offered the job, which she accepted. But things changed, and the same man who interviewed Celestina told her, "We need you to work Sundays."

Justin Webb, who seemed perplexed by Celestina's stance, was told, calmly but impressively firmly: "You have to care for yourself, to be able to give care to other people. If I don't take care of my own spiritual being, I cannot give anybody anything. The reason that I work with them [autistic children] is because God enables me to work with them. It is not an easy job, but I enjoy what I do and believe I have so much to give them."

In other words, Nemo dat quod non habet.

"The Diary of a Shropshire farmer" - again

It's arrived! There can be nothing much more satisfying than to receive a copy of one's own book in the post. Or seeing one's name as author on Amazon.

As trailed previously, my great-great-grandfather, a farmer, wrote a diary, two volumes of which have only fairly recently come to light. They cover his mini-Grand Tour of the North of England and Scotland as a young man of 23, and his day-to-day life in Shropshire during the two years following. Together, they give a snapshot of what British life was like in the 1830s. I have included an introduction, sketching the changes that he witnessed, and that our landscape faces today. This is the bare outline, anyway: it conceals an awful lot of hard work, and not just by me. Let's hope for some reviews!

Old and new in Portugal 2011

We are getting to the end of a fortnight at a rented mill house, Casa do Lagar, a few miles North of Ponte de Lima, in the Portuguese Minho: I have been on holiday from blogging as well as generally. The first week was hot, but the weather has changed rather, and as some of the family has now left, I have returned to the computer, despite snail-like connectivity.

We are only half a mile from the A-3 motorway, with a working quarry a similar distance away the other side, but the main sound reaching us is that of running water, with the occasional ox cart trundling past on the lane. Apart from our garden with its swimming pool, all the land around is intensively cultivated – sweet corn, grapes, cabbages etc. The vines mark the boundaries of small fields hardly bigger than allotments: their owners are out both early and late with hoes, diverting streams of water for irrigation.

In the huge Ponte de Lima market, these same smallholders can be seen seated with their produce about them, or perhaps a basketful of rabbits. They stare at us, as we do likewise by training our cameras upon them.

"A farm for the future"?

Last night, we were at another string quartet recital. Very different from any of our Cheltenham experiences, the Brodsky Quartet's recital took place in the idyllic setting of Guiting Power Village Hall as part of the 39th music festival held there. I remember attending what must have been one of the first, the village's great benefactor Raymond Cochrane making a rather hesitant speech of welcome.

We came expecting to hear a rare programme of Italian music, but preparation time for this had been lost. "I had an accident cutting up the chorizo," violist, Paul Cassidy explained. We could hardly complain at the substitution of Wolf's Italian Serenade and Beethoven Op. 132.

On the narrow road up to Guiting we made way for a huge lorry and trailer loaded with straw bales: my photograph, taken at 9 o'clock during the concert interval, shows - across the cricket ground for which the Village Hall acts as pavilion - a similar vehicle: the harvesting continued even as we drove away from the village an hour later. I wondered what the prognosis was for such hugely carbon-intensive operations, in the light of watching Rebecca Hosking's wonderful BBC2 film, "A farm for the future." You can still catch it in segments on YouTube: start here. Well worth the trouble!