Cheltenham Festival of Literature

The 350 plus events in the programme for this year's local literary festival apparently need 60 pages to describe - a far cry from the slim booklet of relatively few years ago: here is a photograph of the banner which adorned Cheltenham Town Hall for the 1993 Festival: the title sponsor is now The Times.

The Editor of our local paper used to make regular snipes at the Festival's "elitism". Clearly, they were heeded: now the programme has swung to the opposite extreme. Indeed someone rightly complained of this in a Letter to the Editor, published this week. Michael Atherton, Dawn French and Mariella Frostrup will all no doubt attract their crowds. But where are the great figures who used to come to Cheltenham, the poets. the real literary giants, who gathered around Alan Hancox after their events till late into the night?

And why does the brochure need to be larded with so much puff? "In a characteristically provocative and thought-provoking discussion...", "...presents a captivating illustrated explanation...", and "He discusses his new memoir and shares some of his remarkable memories in a hugely enjoyable event." (These are just three examples from the synopsis of what's on in the morning and afternoon of Day 1.)

Do the organizers have a Time Machine, to enable them to review the Festival before it happens? Assuming they don't, why burden us with a work of fiction, when we can perfectly well make up our own minds about which (if any) events we want to pay a lot of money to attend?

My day out with the CPRE

Rather at the last minute, I joined a coach party today, organized by North Cotswold CPRE.

First stop was Bromsberrow Place, just under the Southern slopes of the Malverns, in the far North-West corner of Gloucestershire. Our huge coach all but came to grief under the low-hanging branches of the oak trees lining the drive: not quite another satnav saga, but similar. (We shouldn't have been going in that way.)

Over the past 17 years, the Bromsberrow Place garden, something of a sleeping beauty when in the late Miss Albright's ownership, has been brought fearlessly back to life by the Greenall family, who have made major investments - particularly in trees.

We marvelled especially at the walled garden. Facing South with wide views towards the Cotswolds, it contains rows of groaning apple and pear trees, a vine house, colourful borders and masses of succulent vegetables. It was good to hear that local schools bought the produce, and that their children came along regularly to help harvest it. All the various aspects of this estate seem to run brilliantly under its imaginative and hands-on owners. (This was no surprise to me, having in the past worked alongside Gilbert Greenall - he and I both being trustees of the Summerfield Charitable Trust.)

In the afternoon, our bus took us to the six-acre garden of Elton Hall, owned by Mr. and Mrs. James Hepworth. This is an extraordinarily pretty 18th Century house, brick-fronted with ogee windows, not far to the South-West of Ludlow. (We had driven past it when we were staying on the Croft estate last month.) At Elton also the scene has been transformed in the last 17 years, since the arrival of Anthony Brooks - a most modest man, yet clearly an inspired gardener.

Walking round, it was hard not to be distracted by the Hepworth family elephant (in many guises), horse, puffin etc. collection - all dead; and the five inhabitants of Fort Tortoise, very much alive. The garden is full of follies - one (dating from 1997) to commemorate a distinguished former owner, Thomas Andrew Knight, an early President of the RHS: a Latin inscription on the floor below his portrait gives thanks to the EU for the grant which helped build it - and to those who don't smoke within the gazebo.

I don't know anything about planting, but in this garden the late Summer colours - and the way they were massed - seemed to me particularly magnificent. The ladies with notebooks amongst us were enthusing about Echinaceas and Rudbeckias. Even table tombs in the adjoining churchyard seem to have been carefully bowered with wild flowers. Excess of pure colour is painful: variety and combination of colours is most pleasurable - so taught Thomas Knight's more famous elder brother, the connoisseur Payne Knight.

Overall I found it was the Elton experience that marginally won my heart - in spite of the Bromsberrow bravura. But almost best of all in the day was to be driven painlessly through Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire, countryside as varied and majestic as any one could hope to experience in the course of a two-hour journey.

Transfiguration

Today's feast is the Transfiguration - one of the best in my view: Jesus becoming radiant, as witnessed by three of his closest friends.

There is that uncanny echo of "radiance" in the word "radiation". It never fails to remind me that 6th August is the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. 120,000 people died, a whole city destroyed.

Fr. George Zabelka was a young Catholic priest, freshly enlisted into the chaplain corps of the U.S. Army Air Force. Being assigned to the 509th Composite Group, the unit responsible for planning and executing the Hiroshima raid, he blessed the members of the bombing crew before they took off.

Fr. Zabelka later made friends with Martin Luther King. He came through this friendship to see things from a different perspective: “Each one of us," he wrote, "becomes responsible for the crime of war by co-operating in its preparation and in its execution. This includes the military. This includes the making of weapons. And it includes paying for the weapons. There’s no question about that. We’ve got to realize we all become responsible. Silence, doing nothing, can be one of the greatest sins.”

WALL-E: spoiler alert!

Caroline and I went to the cinema together last night, a relatively rare occurence. Based on a favourable review and recommendations from Edmund and Thomas, our choice was the latest Pixar offering, WALL-E.

Its hero/heroine -arguably - is not the lovable, sentient robot of the title, but the last, or rather the first, plant on a planet Earth that has been overwhelmed by consumer waste, and whose inhabitants have mass-migrated to Space Station Axiom. The film is the story of their fight to recolonise Earth, which of course they do.

Caroline and I had a good laugh at the choice of the space station's name: her time with the Axiom Centre of the Arts here in Cheltenham was spent making a place full of opportunities to help people be as creative as possible: the computer running WALL-E's Axiom was intent on making its inhabitants as docile as possible.

Coincidentally, yesterday morning's email from Christian Ecology Link read as follows:

Conventional food production incurs the following hidden costs:
· 1,000 tonnes of water are consumed to produce every tonne of grain;
· 10-15 energy units are spent for every energy unit of food on our plates;
· With processed foods, more than 1,000 energy units are used for every energy unit of food;
· 12-15 energy units are wasted for every energy unit of food transported per thousand air-miles;
· 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, which produces 60% of all methane emissions and 70% of nitrous oxide;
· Nearly 90% of all agricultural subsidies benefit corporations and big farmers, while in the USA alone 500 family farms close down every week; and
· Subsidised surplus food dumped on developing countries creates poverty, hunger and homelessness on a massive scale.

Axiom, here we come?

WALL-E, the verdict? A dazzlingly clever film, crammed with an immense amount of imaginative detail, some of it genuinely funny and touching; but a film made with a budget of $180m, trailing movie-related merchandise, advertising, not to mention popcorn in its wake - all those things that give rise to the opening hypothesis, that we are heading towards environmental disaster. The end of this film is to entertain and make money. It is therefore, in my view, ultimately making light of our greatest challenge, its "bold" theme ironically causing filmgoers to become numbed to the possibility of overcoming that challenge.

Pictures fail me

There was quite a full house yesterday evening for mass at my Catholic parish church, St Gregory's here in Cheltenham: the celebrant was Fr. Tom Smith, the parish priest's assistant, ordained three years ago. In his homily, after a few words on the readings, he told us he had spent last week in residence at Merton College, Oxford. An anonymous donor had, he said, paid for him to attend the Latin Mass Society's course on learning to say what I once knew as the Tridentine mass. (I note the fee was £150 for the week – which is itself acknowledged on the Society's website as being "heavily subsidised".)

Clearly, the course had made a great impression on our young priest. He spoke at length about the beauty of the "extraordinary form". Further he announced that he had, immediately upon his return to Cheltenham, sought (and obtained) the parish priest's permission to celebrate the old mass publicly this coming Saturday. He urged us to come.

Any priest making such a significant statement and plea will no doubt influence his congregation. Plenty of people are, therefore, likely to be there on Saturday. But I will not be one of them.

I grew up in the Catholic faith, and in about 1950 became an altar server. I learnt by heart the Latin responses, rattling them off, as did any good member of the Guild of St Stephen in those days. At school I studied Latin up till A level, so came to understand and appreciate the words for their meaning – not just as mantras.

Vatican II coincided with my university years: thanks to a remarkable chaplain, my generation of undergraduates became rapidly familiar with its teaching, and in particular its liturgical reforms, which made good sense. Moving to London, I was in parishes with priests who likewise embraced those reforms.

In the Seventies, I found myself in a small, rural parish, with an Irish priest still saying mass with his back to the congregation. I struggled to understand how this good old man's ways could help us interpret for all The Church in the Modern World, let alone Populorum Progressio. I read the magazines he left at the end of the church, published by the Society of St Pius X, and found them full of vituperation. Many times I recalled my grandfather's words: God works through very human instruments.

My Sunday sadness was alleviated when a new priest took over. We became encouraged to take a part in the decisions affecting the parish, including the way its liturgy was celebrated. A generation has since passed, and I can't conceive of a return to the blessed mutter of the mass (as it is in its extraordinary form). Attendance at (I could not call it "participation in") the funeral mass of a Tridentine stalwart last December confirmed me in my opinion.

The Archbishop of Birmingham's address to last year's Merton College course included these words: No matter the language of the celebration, no matter the form … the liturgy must be set forth clearly. The celebrant, acting in the person of Christ and in the name of the Church, needs to ensure that his actions enable the souls in his care to participate in this saving mystery, to take part in each of its steps. This participation has to be profound, spiritual, informed by understanding – an active participation and not passive, not ‘leaving it to the priest to celebrate the Mass for us.’…The Tridentine mass remains the extraordinary form of the celebration of the Mass, for, as Pope Benedict says, its use ‘presupposes a certain degree of liturgical formation and some knowledge of the Latin language; neither of these is found very often.’

From next month the two St Gregory's priests will be responsible, not only for our large town parish, but also for the adjoining St Thomas More's parish – also large, with its own distinct and very considerable social problems. For years, our priests have been too busy to visit parishioners, or offer house blessings. The degree of ecumenical – let alone inter-faith – activity in Cheltenham involving its clergy is negligible. There is no Justice and Peace activity, and no apparent concern to address as a Christian challenge the environmental crisis facing our world today.

I am forced to ask, how is it that a priest of my son's age comes to decide to take the time needed to study and prepare for regular celebration of mass in the extraordinary form, when there is so much else that needs doing?

Floreat Ed'n'Bella

Ed Nightingale and Bella Mackie were married yesterday afternoon in Eton College Chapel. It was my first visit: what a joy to worship there, with all the colour and life in those eight huge John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens windows!

The wedding service was memorable on a number of counts: for the groom being invisible to most of the congregation - poor man, he had just broken a tendon playing tennis; for the address, by the same priest who married Ed's parents; for that splendid priest omitting to ask whether anyone objected to the marriage (once a lawyer, always a lawyer); and for the music: Parry, Mozart, Bach, Handel, Beethoven - perhaps all to be expected. But Offenbach? Anyway, the Tales of Hoffmann barcarolle was sung beautifully by two of Ed's sisters.

We emerged after the ceremony into the sunlit School Yard, dominated by this statue of Eton's founder, King Henry VI. I've always had rather a soft spot for this king, in spite of - or possibly because of - his being on the "wrong" side in the Wars of the Roses.

She's beautiful, and therefore to be woo'd;
She is a woman, therefore to be won.

One could understand if Ed - an English teacher - had muttered to himself these words (from Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 1) when he met Bella. She was a smashing bride.

Power playing

The Guiting Power Music Festival got going just before I arrived in Gloucestershire: I remember Raymond Cochrane, who in an act of amazing generosity had given much of the village away to a specially-formed charity, making a somewhat halting speech at the first Festival I attended, about 35 years ago.

It was always a pleasure - after the relative formality of the Cheltenham Festival - to go up to Guiting; but in those days it was a bonus if one managed to hit upon a performance which was satisfying musically. With Joanna MacGregor as President, however, in recent years it has gone from strength to strength. And last night's recital was the best I have heard in the charmingly unpretentious Guiting village hall.

To have the chance of hearing and seeing three young, but already world class, string players at such close quarters is a rare privilege. Under Alexander Sitkovetsky's leadership, Natalie Clein and friends gave us a superb early Beethoven (G major) string trio, and - before that - a movement from the lyrical Dohnanyi String Serenade. At the outset, Sasha teamed up with violist Krzysztof Chorzelski, violist in the Belcea Quartet, for a vibrant - the stage flowers seemed in danger of falling off their stand - performance of the Mozart Duo K423, and Natalie gave an impassioned Kodaly solo cello sonata, Op.8: quite a tough nut for the audience, not to mention the performer.

Where else could you have swings to swing on, an entire playing field to picnic in, and end the evening with such an outstanding performance?

A militant tendency

This week, we have had a stimulating visitor staying with us. Caroline's Goddaughter Lizzie is much the same age as Agnes. She didn't much enjoy her convent school, but obviously thrived - intellectually and socially - at London University.

Since then she has involved herself in education, in the broadest sense. During our conversation under the apple trees, she told us about her recent ten-day Vipassana Meditation course, and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. She described living in various London squats, and the soup kitchens, workshops and street theatre she helps set up.

She was off shortly to spend time with her sister Ellie's international charity, Firefly in its work with children in Bosnia. Apart from occasional foreign forays (France, Guatemala), she says she stays mainly in inner London. "You could cut some sweet peas," I suggested to her. Coming to us in Cheltenham, she said, was like the town mouse going into the country - and she asked me to show her what were sweet peas!

Beside the hard - at times challenging - edge to her life and work, there was a great sense of lightness and composure about Lizzie, a delightful guest. Godchildren are such a privilege.

Pinswell

On our way to supper with friends on Sunday, we interrupted Pippa and Jeremy Jefferies on their mission - a walk via Pinswell to the Colesbourne Inn. They have the three books written by Australian author and illustrator Annette Macarthur-Onslow, they said, based on her time at the "round" house (well, it is half round - see photograph taken earlier this year) at Pinswell. This most idyllic of cottages stands by the fork in the track where the gospel was first preached in these parts - before the Norman church at Coberley was built. A few hundred yards distant, on higher ground, is the even more ancient Norbury Camp, the layout of which is clearly visible on Google Earth. (The photograph at the head of this post shows the track leading up towards Norbury from the Colesbourne direction, on Sunday evening.)

Godfather Michael, R.I.P.

When I first went into partnership as a solicitor, it was with Michael Rawlinson and Harry Wiggin in 1974. Michael, his wife Anne and their two (then young) children Nicholas and Susan became firm friends. Michael was Leo's very fond Godfather: he never forgot a birthday.

While Harry and I moved on, Michael stayed at Wiggin and Co (it was always "and" then) until his retirement, 11 years ago. Latterly he was the firm's PSL, one of the first of that breed in this country, and one of the best: Michael ran a very tight ship in the legal information flotilla, and played an important part in securing for his firm its high reputation in a specialist field. (He would no doubt have been quick to draw attention to the mixed metaphor - not in any pedantic way, but illustrative of his deliciously dry and self-deprecating sense of humour.)

The cruelty was that no sooner had Michael retired than he contracted Parkinson's Disease, which with added complications immediately laid him low. Little of that travelling he had longed to do with Anne was possible, and none of the walking. Rather, his life became more and more an alert mind imprisoned within a bent body. Even a short while ago, when visiting him at our nearby Sue Ryder Home, he had books on mathematics and the Northern saints at his side. On a rare occasion he lost the thread during his conversation with me. "Please talk among yourselves," he said.

Anne looked after Michael at home lovingly, with only very occasional breaks when she went to see the children (now happily settled in Spain and America). She would ring me if this meant I could visit Michael in nearby respite care. She did this most recently last week. I noticed a change in him on Friday, but on Sunday he seemed more on the ball. Yesterday morning, when I called, he was sleeping in his chair, Radio 4 playing as usual. I sat with him for 15 minutes, watching his face change mood, a smile twice flickering across it as he dreamed. Poor man, I thought: he looks so well - surely this living death could continue a long while. Please let it not be so!

In the evening, Anne rang to say that Michael had died - suddenly and peacefully whilst being given his lunch. Thanks be to God, but equally - as Leo said - "How sad, as he was such a nice bloke."

Leo and Michael were photographed (top) in January 2004; and (below) after Leo's Confirmation in May 1992.

Chris the hedges

On arrival in Cheltenham in 1995, I planted two hedges, beech at the front and hornbeam at the back. They took well, and now the only problem is keeping them in trim. This is where Chris comes in. Once a year, usually on the hottest day, he arrives with his land rover and trailer and, in a whirl of machinery, transforms our two straggly rows into respectable town hedges. What's more, he takes away the bits.

That's the bare facts; but beyond them there are the chats over the coffee (the whole of life is here); Chris's deadpan humour; his pride in the progress of his twin sons - Mark, the tennis player, has come with him the last couple of years; and (this year) Ruby, the mad puppy. Chris is one of the nicest, most capable people I know, but also one of the most modest - oh, and chaotic.

Matthewman's - not this year

In Matthewman's sweet pea catalogue, you will find a bewilderingly long list of getting on for fifty varieties. Since seeing their stall at the Chelsea Flower Show, I have bought Matthewman's seeds and planted them in late Autumn as instructed; but last year's purchase - for some reason - remains in its wrapper. So in April, realising I had missed the boat, I bought some plants from our local florist/greengrocer, Robert Young: they have done brilliantly! The most delicate colours, and the longest, straightest stalks - some more than 18" - you could wish for.

Sweet peas are such a gift. You provide a simple structures (as for runner beans) and wind some string round it, then hey presto! They do the rest themselves. On the row, so long as you keep cutting - which you can do for ages - they look ethereal: in the hand in a bunch, they make a great bouquet: in a vase on the kitchen table, they are best of all, giving out their delicious scent. Their short life makes them all the more special. Whom the Gods love die young.

Washbrook

Yesterday, after some of the heat of the day had abated, we drove the nine miles South to Painswick. The annual exhibition of the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen - well worth a visit between now and 25th August - was opening that evening.

Having set off in time to meet our friends John and Sue Colquhoun for a walk beforehand, we aimed Westwards from Painswick into unfamiliar territory. Our path followed the Cotswold Way for a mile or so, then branched right down into a likely-looking, wooded valley, leading to what turned out to be the Washbrook. Soon we came across an unexceptional mill building, just like so many one comes across beside a stream - but look at this William and Mary doorway!

Walter Hawkins, a Bristol brewer, built Washbrook as a grist-mill, it seems. Successive owners milled cloth and then corn here for more than two hundred years. Hawkins' coat of arms, flanked by more swags, surmount another doorway on the same frontage, with an oval window above.

What extraordinarily rich carving to find in the middle of nowhere! (What an encouragement to go places on foot!)

Is the Pope green?

Leo Hickman raised this question last weekend, in the Guardian. It followed Pope Benedict's words in Australia: gazing out of the window on his flight there, he had, he said, been filled with introspection about the plight of the environment.

Benedict is getting something of a reputation as a green Pope. Solar panels have appeared on Vatican buildings, and the Apostolic Penitentiary numbers ecological offences amongst new forms of social sin.

Moreover, Vatican City boasts it is the only sovereign state to have zero carbon dioxide emissions - thanks to the Vatican Climate Forest in Hungary. But, as a theologian from Louvain University points out, where is the justice in this "indulgence-type" method of offsetting one's carbon footprint?

As expected, Hickman's crunch point is to home in on the population consequences of the Church's opposition to contraception - much the same as I reported Jonathon Porritt had concluded in a blog I posted last month.

The Vatican hosts, amongst very many other organisations, a Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerants, headed up by a Cardinal. Travel lightly, it urges: use public transport, carry less luggage and do everything you can to make your holiday environmentally friendly. But what about Vatican Airlines, launched last year to ferry pilgroms back and forth to the world's shrines? Given that a pilgrimage is a metaphor for life's journey, shouldn't we be thinking more in terms of making virtual pilgrimage these days?

Those who may have been gazing down from the two planes in my photograph could also have been "filled with introspection," but it is only we who gaze upwards that see the damaging vapour trails.

Slow Sunday

These days, the Fourth Commandment isn't one we seem to worry too much about breaking. Of a Sunday morning, the temples of commerce are many times fuller than the temples of worship, are they not?

So, wellcome to Resurgence's Slow Sunday idea! The first is this coming Sunday 27th: we are urged to make bread - and even provided with a recipé. As Satish Kumar says, only 4% of bread is baked in local bakeries: "Lorries full of factory bread," he writes, "rush up and down the country on our motorways, polluting the air so that they can provide the nation with cheap bread. But we have paid a very high price for this cheap bread in CO2 emissions and climate change. This mass-produced bread is stale and sterile."

(I spotted these delicious-looking rolls - they were baked locally - in the window of Barber & Manuel's, Leominster: we visited it earlier in the month.)

OYBike

Paris, Barcelona and now... Cheltenham! As I anticipated last month, the University's new cycle hire scheme has been extended throughout Cheltenham as a whole. It's England's first town centre scheme.

Any of 30 bikes can be commandeered at any of nine docking stations - like this one in Montpellier.


And it's free for the first half hour, so you can for instance jump on at the Station and leave your yellow cycle in the Town Centre. If you want one for the day, it's £8 - quite a bit less than the cost of two gallons of petrol. There has been no great rush for them yet - the procedure needs simplifying - but it is early days, and the recession has hardly begun to take hold.

As Cheltenham's terrain is basically pretty flat - compared to somewhere like Sheffield or Bristol - and we are all having to extend our mortgages each time we fill up our fuel tanks, it should succeed.

An die musik

Flouting Pittville Park Regulations (al fresco drinking is proscribed) after the final Pump Room morning concert last Saturday, we threw a Schubert impromptu Kir Boot party.

There could be more such jollity at the Cheltenham Music Festival: I gather there is at festivals such as Buxton and even the dear old Three Choirs. It might help to swell our audiences, which - judging from the dozen events I attended - were poor this year considering the quality of the performance: a very thin house in the Town Hall, for instance, for the sublime Sarah Connolly. And the Town Hall was not exactly jam-packed - as it should have been - for Taraf de Haidouks on Saturday night. (It was good to see our MP Martin Horwood there and his two young children, sitting on the floor tapping their feet.)

The modest turnout can't just be the recession. Where - at the classical music concerts - is the dark- and fair- (as opposed to the white-, the grey- and the no-)haired generation, which throngs the Albert Hall during the Proms season? Is it just Cheltenham, or is it the way we promote the Festival - with rather expensive seats?

Some Festivals ago, the Summerfield Trust gave a grant to enable best Town Hall seats to go to quite a number of children from local schools for a performance (Richard Hickox conducting) ending up with a long Rachmaninov symphony: I recall a gloriously noisy reception in the Drawing-room. It was not an unqualified success - the children had been insufficiently prepared, and it wasn’t the right piece to submit them to. However the principle is right: make them kings/queens for the day, and let the usual audience have a back seat.

Had the marketing for Sarah Connolly been different, with 300 tickets at £5, we could have had a full house, and more income overall at the box office. Our Cheltenham Festivals have become too institutionalized - too much rigid thinking about marketing and sponsorship; and too much visual emphasis on the catering facilities, fine tea-tasting etc. OK, we can't do it without sponsorship, but does the front cover of the Festival programme brochure have to be so dominated by their names? Where does it tell us anything at all about THE MUSIC we are hearing? Isn't music what this Festival is supposed to be about?

Robin Kindersley reflected that, apart from the Connolly evening, every concert he attended contained work by Schubert, and Schubert's music was indeed the central joy of this year's Festival. However, you wouldn't know this from reading Festival Director Meurig Bowen's curious introduction to the brochure - not a mention of Franz Schubert there in his 650-odd words!

In particular - on the three last days - we had performances of the three great Schubert song cycles, with superlative singing by Allan Clayton, Florian Boesch and (an unrecognisable) Mark Padmore, as well as playing by the accompanists Paul Lewis and Roger Vignoles. My neighbour on Saturday for Winterreise had been present at the very first Cheltenham Festival over 60 years ago (and most since), but couldn't recall such fine musicianship. Even for these three events there were some empty seats: Cheltenham's Schubertiad deserved better publicity - and international acclaim.

[I have blogged already on the Festival - here, here and here, in case you are interested.]

Maggie's Cotswold Farm

Maggie's seems to be the charity flavour of the month: hardly surprising, with its cancer caring centres being such a very attractive idea - which could benefit any of us. Next year, the Cheltenham centre, designed by Sir Richard MacCormac, is scheduled to open, and yesterday Iona Birchall kindly let hundreds into her beautiful garden to picnic in aid of its running costs.

As Colin Russell was one of the organizers, there was traditional jazz, live during the afternoon, and an ice cream stall. The sun mainly shone, but there was the inevitable rush for umbrellas at one moment. Cotswold Farm is set in an almost unspoilt stretch of countryside, North of Cirencester, with views towards the Wiltshire Downs, its flower gardens tumbling down into a secret valley. There is a huge and productive kitchen garden too: we bought lettuces.

(More photographs here)

20th meeting of the book group

A week ago, my book group met in Wells. A long way to go for a book discussion? We are six in number, and one of us has defected from Gloucestershire to Somerset. So we were invited to catch up with him at his new house, near the centre of Wells.

I had been there on weekends when my parents came to visit me at All Hallows; so my last acquaintance with Wells was 52 years ago. I hardly remembered it at all. Simon led us around the Cathedral and precincts: a magical tour, ending in an old prebendary's house, called - why? - The Rib, with the most mysteriously beautiful mediaeval interior.

The book for discussion? Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. The score? Two of us liked it, two didn't. I didn't (much). 300-odd pages with no dialogue: an impressive attempt at historical reconstruction, but a bit charmless I thought. More interesting as an insight into the author, than the subject.

Fit to print

"I have some good news for Caroline," the telephone voice said; so I passed it over to her. "The Cheltenham Arts Council are giving you an award as an individual who has made a special contribution to the arts in Cheltenham over the years," the voice told her.

Hooray! Caroline's latest achievement has been wading through a sea of bureaucracy to help establish The Gardens Gallery, which greatly enhances the experience of a trip to Montpellier, as many are finding.

Other family news: Edmund is in Cork, sailing. Leo and Mini have been busy furnishing his flat. Thomas is off in a few weeks' time to Lisbon, to live there for a while (if you have any Portuguese contacts, do email him). Agnes has two or three weeks' house-sitting lined up shortly, and is open to further similar offers. Ida has four teeth, which make themselves felt, and are easily visible as she hardly ever stops smiling. Rosie has lost her Winter coat (and is twice the dog for it). And we still await a buyer for our house, but meanwhile enjoy, if not the sun. then the Summer garden smells: lavender, pelargonium, dianthus, jasmine, roses, tobacco plants, sweet peas and night-scented stock. Still no datura flowers though.

Marc-André Hamelin

This French-Canadian pianist came again to Cheltenham last week: for me and for many I've talked to, his recital has been the highlight of our Music Festival so far - as I was reminded when listening to the recorded broadcast on Radio 3. You can Listen Again to this till next Tuesday morning: go to this page. The slow movement of the Haydn F major sonata is still running through my head. My friend Jeremy Tyndall, whose views I respect, was sitting next to me: at the end, "The first movement of the Schubert," said he, "was far too slow - too much about architecture." I disagreed. Judge for yourself!

With such musical excellence, it's peevish to complain. But if you know me, you will not be surprised that I do, on two aesthetic counts. First, I loathe the Stygian gloom into which the Pittville Pump Room is plunged by the curtains being drawn. This problem seemed to have been cracked last year. There are volunteer helpers around: if there is a potential risk that people will walk past the windows during the performance, then why not post someone outside to redirect them? The interior of Cheltenham's most beautiful building looks so much better in daylight.

Secondly, the size of the catering marquee grows like Topsy. The picture I posted with my blog last week was taken at last year's Festival. At least then one could see some of the front of the Pump Room from Pittville Park, but this year it is impossible to walk into the Park during a concert interval without going through a tented city - which (with its ill-matched hoardings) completely dominates the view when walking up from the town centre. What a shame! I thought this was supposed to be a Festival of Music, not another Festival of Food & Drink.

Widdershins zoo

Having returned from The Marches, we went the other way to North Oxfordshire for Friday night with our kind friends the Lloyds. This meant driving past the Chipperfield menagerie, where of course I couldn't resist a dialogue with something even taller than myself.

Jeremy, Caroline and I had a dampish walk along the Cotswold escarpment below Long Compton, a pretty village, which I remember driving through each weekend on my way back and forward to London, when staying with my parents at Arrow. Somehow, it has survived those years of heavy traffic. Long-term residents no doubt still breathe a sigh of relief. The trouble is, there surely can't be by-passes for every such village, can there?

More photographs here if you have the energy.

"Is modern music murder?"

I've only just caught up with Joe Queenan's provocative article with this title. Listening to Peter Maxwell-Davies's new piano quartet on Sunday morning at the Pittville Pump Room, my thoughts went along similar lines: I hadn't read any programme notes, so heard it with an innocent ear. For one reviewer it "commanded total attention over its 24-minute span." I was talking to her in the interval, and - coward that I am - declined to air my view then: for this listener the 24 minutes could not come to an end soon enough. But at the outset of this Primrose Piano Quartet concert, I did much enjoy their performance of the Dohnányi String Serenade.

It was rather the same story on late Thursday night at the Town Hall Tickell & Bhamra session: spnm put it on to explore the possibilities of combining Indian and British folk traditions. The motley quintet (Northumbrian pipes, sitar, tabla, melodeon and fiddle) came with eight works - four written out by spnm composers, four composed by the players themselves: the performances of the latter - sometimes verging on a jam session - won hands down. I was describing the programme to someone at a later concert: evoking Goering he murmured, "When I hear the words spnm, I head for the exit."

Nobody was doing this on Friday morning, when the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (in their second Cheltenham Festival appearance) were performing unaccompanied music from their folksong treasury. An astonishing sound! And free wine afterwards.

Marches past

Caroline and I had a happy fortnight's holiday in the Marches. We spent four nights in a bed and breakfast by the River Wye, in West Herefordshire: Winforton Court - thoroughly to be recommended. After that, we moved into one of the National Trust's holiday cottages on the Croft Castle Estate in the North of Herefordshire, for six nights. From there, we drove, via Hereford, to stay a night with our good friends Marius and Clare Gray in Kentchurch, in the South-West corner of the county. Finally, we spent last weekend in a mews cottage right in the centre of the small town of Presteigne, just over the border into what was Radnorshire.

Means of transport (this was supposed to be a low-carbon holiday!): OK, so we did drive 466 miles; but taking our bikes on the back of the car: we had three days' cycling round the villages - no punctures and not too many hills; and we had a number of longish walks - along Hergest Ridge above Kington and in the woods at Croft.

Sunshine? The swimming trunks I took for all those refreshing dips in cool river pools came back unworn. It seemed to rain most days, but never for too long that we were in danger of losing our sense of humour. The worst moment was listening to the actor playing Richard III say "All the clouds that lour'd about our house" were "in the deep bosom of the ocean buried" whilst sitting on a plastic chair in a pool of water.

Food: we liked all the pubs we visited for lunches (and some suppers) out - and the little Hat Shop Restaurant in Presteigne. There was much emphasis placed everywhere on local produce. It's not quite the same as being in France of course, but the food was just as tasty - and probably cheaper.

Best bits: the landscapes; the villages; churches, and their embellishments; little things that catch the eye; the architecture; the gardens; the trees; the windows and doorways; the friendly natives; the history - including lots of Davis family history, inevitably (boring for poor Caroline) - and being an hour's drive from the nearest dual carriageway.

Mad north-north-west

I shall try to put together a bit about our fortnight away later (by popular request!). Meanwhile, one memorable event last week was Shakespeare's Richard III in the ruins of Ludlow Castle. With strong performances from the three tragic queens (bringing to mind Macbeth's witches in this production), I was struck by the way the play both contrasts and overlays the mad with the bad.

But for me the holiday's most searing experience was to visit (earlier that same day) a former work colleague. Not much my senior in age, he has for the past year been confined to a home for elderly people with dementia. Once the childlike excitement in his voice subsided, he might have been the man across whose elegant office desk we used to sit and chat. When I told him we were staying near a big house locally, “We used to go to dances there,” he recalled. I brought along some rather ritzy wafer chocolates, Ludlow's best. “Like After Eights,” he said, as he struggled to open the bag. Eventually, I did it for him; and he then proceeded to scoff the lot within the space of five minutes. Death by chocolate would be a merciful release, I thought.

Thirty-nine years ago, I was present in the Queen Elizabeth Hall for the première of Peter Maxwell-Davies's Eight songs for a mad king. It was a novel sort of occasion: members of the Pierrot Players sat in cages on the stage, with a frenetic Roy Hart as the deranged King George - as mad, but not as bad as his predecessor Richard also III - leaping around them, and eventually seizing and stamping upon a player's violin. At the end, the composer Max, looking for all the world like a schoolboy, jumped up onto the stage to storms of applause.

Was it all a con, I wondered, this blend of foxtrots, gavottes, didgeridoo, birdsong imitations and the rest? Now the work has the status of a classic. Even a wine is named after it! And its creator is Sir Max and revered as Master of the Queen's Music.

This afternoon, in the Pittville Pump Room, Max discussed his piece with conductor Charles Hazlewood as part of our Music Festival, before its performance by Psappha - one which (in the light of last week's experiences) made excellent sense, in its commemoration of extreme madness with extreme music.