Over presented?

Thomas, back from Lisbon for a week, has climbed the step ladder to put the star on top of the Christmas tree, which Caroline fetched from Winstone on Thursday last.

We shall be eleven for dinner tomorrow. Nevertheless, when you look at the number of presents already under the tree, you might think we were expecting twice that number. I seem to say this every year. Decades ago, Sarah invited a Polish teacher, Barbara to spend Christmas with us at our family home, the Coach House, Arrow. Upon being asked to sum up her impressions of the day, she volunteered: "I think you are over presented."

Richard II

"In a theatre, the eyes of men, after a well-graced actor leaves the stage, are idly bent on him that enters next," says York in Richard II. Currently, however, eyes (not only of men) are far from idly bent on David Tennant's performance as the King: we have tickets for the live relay in a fortnight, the first such from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. There are queues for returns at the box office, and that will no doubt also be the case at Cineworld.

On Radio 4's Today programme, Maroussia Frank and David have just been talking to Rebecca Jones about the large ring David is wearing as Richard. Maroussia had inherited it from her husband Ian Richardson, who wore it in the iconic 1974 John Barton production, where he alternated with Richard Pasco in the roles of king and usurper: she felt it appropriate that a second Scottish RSC "Richard" should have it, especially - no doubt - bearing in mind that Ian's ashes are interred beneath that very stage on which David Tennant ("son" of Richardson, as it were) has next entered.

As a car-less tour guide at Charlecote Park in the early Summer of 1962, I made it my business to be especially nice to the last party I was taking round in case I could cadge a lift from one of them, back to Stratford. From there, it was usually easy to hitchhike home. One sunny afternoon, some actors were in this final posse, and I ended up with one of them in his Austin A30.

From a stage photograph I spied in the glove compartment, I realised it was Ian Richardson: though I had seen him several times in plays at Stratford, I would hardly have recognised him. "That was a bit of a matinée performance you gave us, I thought." He spoke in a soft, Scottish accent, quite different from his evil-sounding Don John or high-pitched Oberon. ("I had great difficulty persuading Peter Hall that I was right for this part," he told me: Titania was Judi Dench, Helena, Diana Rigg, etc. etc.)

I had asked for a lift to Stratford, but having explained that I lived at Arrow, Ian offered to take me the extra eight miles home. "Would you like to come in?" my father asked him, when we arrived. "Why not?" he replied. After two gins, my parents apologised, "but we are all now due to go for a drink up at Oversley Castle... perhaps you would like to come too?" "Why, yes," was the eager response, and so it was that we had the pleasure of Ian's company for the evening: as it progressed, so his tongue loosened.

I went back stage a few times after seeing him perform subsequently, the final occasion - shortly before his too early death - being after a reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets in our Town Hall. Never, of course, did I quite manage to recapture the easy atmosphere of that Summer evening.

My photograph was taken in Bristol Cathedral on Monday: there are a number of fragments of mediaeval glass preserved there. "Within the hollow crown, that rounds the mortal temples of a king, keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp." One might almost suppose that Shakespeare wrote these lines having visited Bristol and seen this curious image.

"Arrow Vicarage"

Gertrude Louisa Davis' 1865/6 diary has recently been painstakingly transcribed by my Canadian cousin Bruce and his wife. Born in July 1847, she started writing a regular diary when aged nearly 15, and Bruce and Genie have now typed up four volumes/years. There isn't as much of significance in them as in her father's from three decades earlier, but part of the entry for 16th May 1865 interested me: "Papa went to a luncheon at Arrow Vicarage."

Arrow was six miles North of the Davis home in 1865, Bickmarsh Hall. And Arrow Vicarage (photographed, above, at around the time of Peter Davis' visit) was purchased by his great-grandson, my father, 89 years afterwards.

Farewell old friend

My mother used to enjoy sitting in this chair, beside her fireplace at Arrow. We inherited it (the chair), but I sense that Caroline was never that keen on it. Anyway, it's long been in need of repair. Happily, we have lots of other places to sit, so while making room for this year's Christmas tree we decided it had to go. It has now made a freecycler very happy (she said): many others were queuing up behind her.

Hope and expectation

Asparagus was always something my mother cooked for me on my birthday: having green fingers, her bed at Arrow was invariably productive. When I was feeling rich one Christmas, I bought my parents a set of special plates to eat their asparagus off. They came from Gien on the Loire: we have inherited them.

Though keen on growing vegetables from when I moved to live in the country in 1973, it wasn't until 1982 that I prepared and planted up an asparagus bed. The following year, we moved house - and with snow on the ground we neglected to tell the buyers not to dig up the crowns. Walking past our old house a while later, I saw that they had dug over the bed.

Perhaps as an unconscious prod to stir myself towards another move of house, I planted a few more asparagus crowns in our Cheltenham garden yesterday.

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.