Stone

All Saints Stone is one of the most Southerly of Gloucestershire's churches and the 188th I have photographed - which I did this sunny afternoon after dropping Agnes back in Bristol. Its tall tower and spire can be seen for miles around this flat part of the old county, not far from the Severn.

Seven up

Our youngest grandchild achieves 7 on Thursday, and we anticipated the event this afternoon, at Sydenham Road, where seven children and seven adults gathered round for the cutting of Caroline's cake.

Pre-birthday tea

Ida's birthday is not till tomorrow, but the celebrations are taking place in advance this year, for one reason or another. Agnes' Mamma Mia! cake set a triumphant seal on the children's party last Friday, and this afternoon Thomas, Caroline and I pitched up in time for tea in Bristol, and seeing the joy of a seven-year-old open presents.

Family value

Half our quartet have been in the public eye this past weekend. Agnes was in Foyles, Bristol speaking at a publishing event; and Thomas was quoted in an article entitled "Who said Britons were drunk, dirty and deplorable?" in Saturday's Guardian. "People here do it slowly but surely," he was quoted as saying (a line which needs a little context).

Drake's Island

A bit bleary-eyed, I awoke this morning as the ferry crossed into Plymouth Sound. Reclining seats aren't my favourite place for sleeping, but mine served. It was a dawn worth waking earlier for.

The sky clouded over as we biked up the fairly deserted city streets towards Central Park, near where we had parked the car. By 10ish we were on Edmund's boat in Bristol; at 1, we stopped near Twyning to eat our sandwiches, and around 4 we were drinking tea outside the Charles I Coffee House in Newark.

Eightsome

Yesterday afternoon, 13 of us convened for tea on Edmund's boat, with live music and the nostalgic hiss of a steam train in the background. Caroline had slaved over a hot stove all Friday, confecting - aided by the internet - a castle cake for William's eighth birthday. It arrived intact, retaining the desired wow factor despite one of its towers looking distinctly Pisan from the journey in a hot car.

Pieces of eight continued this afternoon with Glyndebourne's much talked about Octavian delighting us in the live relay of Der Rosenkavalier: more than eight times simpler to watch it at home than struggle into dinner jackets and drive all the way to East Sussex. And then there's the cost of tickets...

The Froome Valley

Yesterday, four of us met up at the Daneway Inn for a walk up to Pinbury Park and back via Dorvel Wood. We saw a trip of goats (all black), a rag of colts (destined to be polo ponies, and waiting for the vet to geld them), and a bevy - there must have been a dozen or more - of roe deer, showing us a way into the woods. There the wild garlic reminded me of the bärlauch on so many menus in Germany and Switzerland last month. (My photograph shows the sign I followed when looking for a bed in Märstetten - and very comfortable it was too.)

The new service station on the North-bound M5 near Gloucester is "Hofladen" (farm shop) writ large: we stopped there for (very expensive) petrol en route home from supper with Edmund in Bristol last night. On the one hand, I can't conceive of any reason beneficial to the environment why more commercial outlets should be needed: on the other, if you are going to have motorway service stations, they might as well be on this (the Westmorland Tebay) model.

Today, I've been in amongst my not-so-wild garlic. (Only the weeds have gone wild, but they pull out readily after the rain.) And this evening, we went to Cineworld (along with half the rest of Cheltenham, it seemed) for the National Theatre's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This, with its dizzy-making camera angles and Pirandellian roots, hugely benefited from the big screen relay. Fabulous drama!

Colourful Clifton

This was supposed to be the day of our Romania reunion walk in the Cotswolds. In the wake of last week's storms and flooding, and with rain forecast for this week, we postponed it - needlessly as it turns out: today has been sunny, still and only occasionally showery.

From Bristol Temple Meads, I cycled along discrete paths all the way to Edmund's boat, a lovely scenic route. Then, with the boys, we explored the harbour, altogether a safe place. It helps that Bristol has a green Mayor of course.

The inspector on my Cross Country train back to Cheltenham blotted a happy day out by rushing through the train, banging his machine into my shoulder with malice aforethought: I am not in the habit of sending irate emails to Customer Relations, but this afternoon I broke with habit.

100 up

Agnes completed her 100th poem at home in Bristol between lunch and tea on the first day's play at Brisbane. More than satisfactory in both quarters: with Gift Aid, the 24-hour poetry slam will have raised the best part of £2,000 for the typhoon victims, whereas, in the cricket, Australia look to be pushed to reach the statutory 400 they might be said to need as a platform for a win in the First Test.

Everybody following our daughter's 24 hour burst of creativity has expressed amazement at the richness of her imagination. Let's hope the experience, as well as helping the needy, opens some doors for her!

Meanwhile, in London today, we managed a visit to Prue Cooper's show at Abbott and Holder. We have long admired her press-moulded earthenware pots, as quirky as they are useful. Her blurb says she likes to make "things that communicate through being used... the lettering being integral to the design in the same way that the words are integral to a song... We're bound together by stories."

My favourite in the present exhibition is this one photographed: I shall never now be able to listen with proper seriousness to Marcellus' questioning of Barnardo in the opening scene of Hamlet.

Earlier, at a cousins' lunch, I overheard part of a discussion about houses in the country, and the husband of one cousin asking another (female), never before encountered, "Is your seat large?"

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.

Bristol Family Arts Festival

Half term is big business for Bristol's many and varied palaces of culture. Nine organisations have clubbed together to make a trail through the City Centre: we followed part of it with the boys today, being based on Edmund's boat, visible in the centre of the photograph. This I took from the M Shed balcony, which gives a great 180 degree view over the Avon and Northwards.

You could spend a whole day in the M Shed itself, but we also packed in the best part of an hour at the Architecture Centre (model building making) and lit a candle or two in Bristol Cathedral, where we admired some weird fragments of mediaeval glass in the Cloister: finally, we visited the Library to choose a DVD. (We only just remembered to get it unlocked - something Cheltenham hasn't yet begun to require us to do.)

And the boys and I marvelled - each in our own way - at Michael Dean's "The Introduction of Muscle" exhibition at the Arnolfini. This occupies two rooms - one huge, one smaller. But "occupies" them with a total of five modestly-sized sculptures. "It's all about texture," the helpful gallery guide told us, encouraging us to feel the amorphous, coloured concrete objects. One was recognisable as a cabbage. Others resembled a tongue, a pair of arms, possibly someone's back. No "labels" are supplied. The black flooring and the (white?) lighting form part of the "show".

The boys enjoyed being able to run round: to put it another way, they took the fact that this was "art" in their stride. I had more of a problem: the acronym Grayson Perry gave us in his "Nice rebellion, Welcome In!" Reith lecture yesterday morning was MAYA, "most advanced yet acceptable". But is it?

Photography came under the microscope in the previous lecture. ("It rains on us like sewage from above.")  His advice to photographers seemed to be, make all your editions limited: "if something is endless, it's giving away part of its qualification as art." You can easily tell, Perry said, if a portrait photograph is art or not. "Are they smiling? If they are - probably not art."

Joint Core Strategy

With heavy hearts, we trekked down to Shurdington Social Centre this evening: the outing was to visit the three local Councils' travelling exhibition to promote their draft plan for where to locate an extra 33,200 new homes over the next 18 years. Of particular concern to the Davis family is that over a thousand of them are scheduled to interfere big time with Caroline's dog-walking.

We listened to a desperately dull presentation from one of many men in a suit, who then declined to answer questions from the floor. Whereupon the microphone was grasped by a spokesperson for the snappily-acronymed Hatherley and Shurdington Triangle Action Group, HaShTAG. Bridget Farrer (she it is in my photograph), the bit firmly between her teeth, resisted all the suits' attempts to cut her short, a doughty display, much appreciated by the citizenry.

It has to be important to safeguard the lea of the Cotswold escarpment from the building that's mooted. I go back to an idea promoted by Kit Braunholtz many years ago: develop along a channel directly between Cheltenham and Gloucester, and combine that development with a major upgrade of the public transport infrastructure - e.g. a new light railway - and a strategy for bringing together the complementary strengths of Cheltenham and Gloucester. So far from either losing its identity, there's no reason why their distinctive attributes could not be enhanced by such a process. Further, the joint attraction of the two towns would make our area a more viable alternative to Bristol for those wishing to relocate to the South-West.

Early for school

Agnes is in Oxford for the final residential of the first year of her creative writing Masters; which explains my presence in Bristol, ensuring Ida turns up on time at school. (We were even there early today, which is apparently an unheard of event.)

The atmosphere at Ashley Down Infants bears no relationship whatever to that of my own first school, Swans Close, Stratford-on-Avon, which was relatively speaking a grim place, ruled over by a Miss Short and a Miss Walsh: odd that I can recall their names even after a lapse of 65 years. Ida's playground impressed me no end, with trouble-taking teachers and purposeful parents all milling. I suppose I was seeing it at the best time of year, warm and fine.

Cheltenham Green Doors

Last year and the year before we called it Eco Open Homes or ECOHAB: this year, we were Cheltenham Green Doors, to chime in with the Bristol model. And we brought forward the openings to June, rather than September, as they were previewed by an event in the Cheltenham Science Festival earlier in the month.

So I had an enjoyable time this weekend cycling around the fifteen venues - houses, a shop and gardens demonstrating a more sustainable way of life - and took some photographs. In most places, there were visitors at the time I called in, and they were eager to know what was on offer and to engage in conversation: our increased efforts at publicity seem to have reaped some dividend. We shall see what others, more closely involved, have to say at the meeting that's fixed for 2nd July: it's a lot of work, but is it worth going on with it year in, year out?

Bristol

We had lunch with the three grandchildren yesterday, on Edmund's barge in Bristol Docks. The Bristol Walking Festival had its base just by the boat, and William and I went on a "plant" walk, down along towards Clifton. We spotted a mouse amongst the vegetation, well planted up and growing happily alongside the river, below the path, and presided over by a statue of the formidable Samuel Plimsoll.

"Free Bird"

Edmund's "new" boat is in the water at last, initial repairs having been completed and the harbour master satisfied. We went down to Bristol to see it this morning, and very large it is too! Two bedrooms, two bathrooms (one with a bath), and the largest steering wheel you've ever seen.

Bristol Nativity

What with the papers full of news of the decline in the percentage of self-professed Christians in last year's Census, it was salutary to find ourselves at our granddaughter's nativity play this afternoon.

Ashley Down Infants School clearly takes it all perfectly seriously, with contemporary songs. There was a massed band of angels of the Annunciation, and the Kings came with quite a retinue. Ida perfected her shepherd's wave for our benefit, sitting on mini chairs at the back of the hall. (I popped up to take this photograph, as happily seemed to be the norm.)

Duetting

We were invited to Bristol last evening, for Imogen Cooper and Paul Lewis' duet recital at St George's. The seemed to enjoy it as much as did the packed audience!

The programme - all performed on two pianos, notwithstanding its provenance as piano four hands - consisted, as one would expect from these specialists, mostly of Schubert; but diluted with a splash of Brahms - and some Dvořbert to end the first half: the lovely Schubert Andantino Varié elided seamlessly - and fittingly - into a couple of Dvořák's Slavonic Dances.

After the interval came a stunning performance of the astonishing Grand Duo, which seems to gather momentum throughout its 40 minutes. It was apparently written for two young Countesses - what technique they must have had! You don't often hear it; and indeed I can only recall being at one previous live performance. On that occasion, as Schubert intended, the two young lady pianists (not Countesses, but princesses) were seated at the same grand piano in the great hall at Dartington. The year? Late 'Sixties/early 'Seventies. The pianists, displaying strong elbows and a great sense of humour? Tessa Uys and... Imogen Cooper.

"Once a pilgrim..."

To Bristol today for the second time this week: more particularly, to Bristol's oldest building, St James' Priory, used for worship for approaching 900 years. After lunch, 30 or so of us met in what remains of a very large church, not so much for worship as for reflection upon the graces of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela: most of us had walked (or cycled) the Camino - or were intending to do so. My photograph shows Gerry Slamond leading us in a pilgrim song, one of several he wrote when walking through Spain: he even performed one during the pilgrims' mass in Santiago Cathedral.

So, what lessons did my fellow ex-pilgrims share with us? "It taught me to get rid of everything in life except the essentials," one said. "But I'm still working on it." Why do we keep doing it? was another question. (I couldn't help thinking of Eliza's words in My Fair Lady: "Go to St James so often I will call it St Jim.") "It's the existence of a goal," said one. "No," said another, "it's the journey." "No, it's the people," said a third.

One of those present who'd done a fortnight as a hospitalero in the CSJ's Refugio Gaucelmo at Rabanal del Camino spoke of the language difficulties which arose from time to time. A South Korean, whom he had gone out of his way to accompany to the edge of town, fearing he would not find the start of his next stage, bowed deeply to him, saying, "I will never remember you."

Rising 5

Our granddaughter celebrated her fifth birthday at the weekend, and we were in Bristol yesterday, to taste some of the cake. Agnes and Ida seem to have settled happily into their new surroundings, Ida loving her school, just five minutes' walk from the house. Its playground seems pretty well-equipped. And in their tiny garden at home, there's now a trampoline, as well as two rabbits.