Shades of green

40 came round our garden in the six hours for which we were open today as part of Cheltenham Green Doors. Five were children, but all seemed more or less committed to the quest for the shortest distance from land to mouth.

At four, we shut up shop and jumped into the car to drive up to Cranham, to see one of the other properties: it was open till six. That was quite a show-stopper: a green oak new build on the site of the TB Sanatorium where George Orwell had once been a patient. It's 1,000 feet up and thus with a fabulous view, over first open fields and then Buckholt Wood, sunny from breakfast to dinner.

My photograph shows the North side, where you drive in past a new lake and bund dividing the property from Cranham Sawmill. The facing here is a wall of Cotswold stone, the other side all glass, with sedum roof and both PV and solar thermal panels.

The owner indicated a line through the pond dividing Cotswold District from Stroud: the two Councils agreed, he said, that Stroud should deal with the planning application, which they were happy to approve, being "top eco".

Are such houses a sign of hope or of contradiction? I suppose the hope is that they can be the F1 racing cars of their time, justifiable on the grounds that they pave the way for more energy efficient roadsters. Because what we need of course is not just top eco, but middle and bargain basement eco too. Otherwise top eco will end up as unjust as Richard ("Eco") Branson's dream of Martian emigration.

Cranham

If there's an award for the least-twee Cotswold village, Cranham must be in the running. We four walkers parked up from the pub today, and did a circuit which virtually beat the parish's bounds.

The church, restored by Sidney Gambier Parry, looks ordinary from outside, but within contains treasures: a pair of mysteriously dark paintings depicting miracles in the nave, an early 16th Century German reredos, some fine stained glass from the Powell workshop either side of the Chancel.

The mud was manageable on a warm, mainly sunny morning - perfect for resumption of exercise: it was the first Wednesday walk for four weeks. From the Common, our path led past Haregrove, complete with its hare weathervane: this photograph was taken from the drive. I wonder who lives there? Not Lily Allen: we passed her house at Overton a little later on our walk, stepping aside for the Sainsbury's van careering down her drive. It was followed shortly by the Royal Mail. Surely a sensible privatisation would have seen Sainsbury's bidding to deliver letters alongside its frozen peas?

Above Sheepscombe

Being deprived by festivities of our last two Wednesday walks, we met at Foston's Ash yesterday morning, to shake away some cobwebs. The mud was our main prospective enemy, because of the terrific rainfall recently. (Our drawing-room alcove ceiling almost gave way: just in time, Edmund drilled holes to channel the water leaking in.)

To avoid the shooting at Climperwell, we walked towards Cranham and then leftwards into the beechwoods above Sheepscombe. Hard core has long been laid on the tracks there, providing a firm path for us as well as the forest machinery. This giraffe-like trunk caught my eye.

Delaying our start till a squall had passed, we then missed any more rain, and indeed the sun lit up the tree tops on our final stretch, through the woods that the late John Workman gave to the National Trust.

That is an organisation evidently not solicitous about its punctuation: "Workmans Wood" on one sign, and "Workman s Wood" on two others. Should one be surprised when one of its top brass sends us a family round robin displaying a similarly cavalier approach to the apostrophe rule?

Oh dear! Bang goes my New Year's resolution - to be less nerdish. It contrasts somewhat in scale with Ian Jack's. Writing in today's Guardian, he says:

New Year resolutions rarely see out February because they're born in a… wishy-washy sort of hope, too weak to resist the seduction of old habits. Fear, on the other hand, keeps you on the straight and narrow… Domesticated ruminants are the largest source of anthropogenic methane and account for 11.6% of greenhouse gases that can be attributed to human activity…The use of highly productive croplands to produce animal feed is [also] questionable on moral grounds because this contributes to exhausting the world's food supply. Other well-known consequences include tropical deforestation and the erosion of biodiversity, but unless governments intervene… it seems unlikely that the demand for animal flesh can be curbed. 

But which popularly elected government will ration meat or deliberately price it as a luxury?… 

Nonetheless, my resolution this year is to become a vegetarian… I doubt that I can stick to it. Where's the terror at three in the morning that will change my behaviour? A gale may be tearing over the house and a flood running down the street, but the link to a lifetime's mince consumption will be hard to fix in my imagination. When it comes to the bleak future of the world, the complicated route between cause and effect is the greatest barrier to our doing much to change it.