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.

Pumpkins

The burgeoning Halloween industry bypasses me, but it's hard to be a killjoy when you see what pleasure it gives children to gorge the flesh out of a pumpkin and more or less instantly create a spooky face.

The invasion...

...has arrived. Edmund yesterday brought the three grandchildren to stay - on and off till the end of the holidays.

Caroline has set them tasks: William was on raspberry-picking this morning. "Have you been eating them?" I asked, as he presented the container half-filled. "I haven't had any out of the bowl," he replied.

Obviously destined for a career in diplomacy.

Seven wheels

William, Edmund and I have been biking in London - from Paddington to the Tower, and here we are posing under the Eye. As on last year's car-free Saturday, when I went with a University friend, it was a glorious day for cycling. Even more than before turned out, though today I didn't spot so many (other) eccentrics.

At times William wiggled almost as much as his uncle Leo did at his age, but whenever I thought I'd lost him, I heard him whistling peacefully not far away in the throng.

The pocket chess set I had brought with me came in useful on the return train journey: my mother gave it me as a child, and I in turn passed it on to Edmund aged seven, but it remained in a drawer at home. Now it has a third name inside it: William's. He shows promise.

Edmund meanwhile wrestled with emails - giant haystacks of them: how lucky was I, he exclaimed, to have grown up in an era of less than instant comms.

Seven plus

No grandchildren, but all four children were with us for lunch today - plus Mini; and it's always difficult to prevent Caroline's dog from muscling in on the act. ("No balls inside, Floss!")

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.

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.

Birmingham

I knew David Wood a little at Oxford, where he displayed a precocious talent in the OUDS and ETC. Starting as he meant to go on, he is now hailed by some as the children's theatre laureate. We turned our backs on panto for once in order to sample his adaptation of "Tom's Midnight Garden" this afternoon, the children scoring it 10 out of 10.

For this, the five of us sat at the back of the steeply-raked stalls at Birmingham Old Rep. It's celebrating 100 years as a theatre this year, and the space between the rows is an indication of how well we've all been eating our greens in the interim. I remember being taken to pantos there by my grandmother Gateley - probably in the 1940s, when my legs and trousers were shorter.

Before the play, we paid a visit to the crib at St Philip's (in fact two cribs - plus of course the Burne-Jones Nativity window); and then had lunch in the new Library café, explored its lifts and escalators and admired the view from the top floor. The children rolled merrily around on the carpet of the recreated Shakespeare Memorial Room, where they clearly felt at home. (Ida has been spouting Macbeth.)

Three and a half Kings

These many years, we have been carol singing at Long Newton on the Sunday before Christmas. The three kings were last night cast as in 2012, and in the same sequence - wearing almost the same trousers. The only difference this time was that William had a walk-on part as Balthasar's page.

It was a poignant evening, as we learnt that this will be the last such happy occasion to be held in this house.

Seven up

William likes his new bike, I'm pleased to say. He and Edmund collected it this afternoon, arriving just after Leo and Mini left: I guess they are still somewhat jet-lagged after their flight from Osaka last night. (Quick check on the world map: Japan is nearly 2,000 miles North of the poor Philippines, suffering so terribly from Super Typhoon Haiyan.)

Here this morning, it was sunny and still enough - St Martin's Little Summer - for me to be in shirt sleeves, planting my Aquadulce beans, accompanied by our faithful robin. (Boo! to the neighbour's cat.)

Meon Hill

A couple of Summers ago, I posted a photograph of Meon Hill, but this shows it better: I took it yesterday, pausing on the drive up Saintbury Hill. I was making my way home after collecting a bike Edmund had bought on eBay for William: his earlier one had been stolen - proof (as if needed) that you can't leave things lying unlocked on a Bristol riverside.

I also photographed the church at Saintbury, across a field from the road - on the off chance that it was in Gloucestershire: it is - as I discovered on my return; but quite near the Worcestershire border. In August 1990, Thomas, Paddy and I cycled to Arrow, and Saintbury Hill was on our route home. It was deemed too steep: "I'm going this way," said Thomas (pointing down the flat road towards Willersey). It was a sticky moment, but by dint of stick and carrot we did eventually all push our bikes up through the churchyard. There were no further complaints, as from the top, it's all more or less downhill.

William's "new" bike was from Honeybourne, four miles South of Bickmarsh. I came there circuitously from lunch at the Air Balloon - not a pub I shall seek out on another such occasion: perhaps demolition for the much-needed road improvements is the best thing that could happen to it, though how to preserve that evocative name?

I drove from there up the M5, turning off at Ashchurch, where I stopped to photograph St Andrew's: it stands like an oasis in the desert, surrounded as it is by industrial buildings, main roads and the railway. Gloucestershire is nothing if not a county of contrast.

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."

Scarey gardening

We were asked to lunch in Great Milton today. Not at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, but we made a detour through its vegetable garden on our way back from a post-prandial walk. And what a garden it is!

The website tells me it extends to two acres, and supplies 90 types of salad and vegetable. All organic. And surrounded by espalier apple and pear trees. The bronze scarecrow is apparently modelled on Raymond Blanc himself (and reminds me of the violinist sculpture presiding over the wild flower garden at Long Newnton, which was modelled on Edmund - wearing my hat).

"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.

Lea-ving

As last Saturday, we spent most of today down near Malmesbury, helping Edmund pack up his cottage at Lea. The removal van comes tomorrow morning. Unlike last week, it eventually turned out to be a bright day. After three fine days, it suddenly seems to be Spring and things are needing doing.

En route, we parked at Stockwell, to give Floss a walk. Just before getting back into the car, I had my first glimpse of the sun as a crisp golden disc in the cloud - as one usually sees a full moon on a clear night.

"Arise Sir Martin"

Edmund gave me the happy news at breakfast that our good friend Martin Smith had been awarded a long-overdue knighthood in the New Year Honours!

He it was with whom we walked and lunched yesterday in Miserden, but not a word did he then breathe of the news of his elevation: great self-control, I call that.

In my congratulatory email I suggested he and Bradley Wiggins should ride down The Mall together on a tandem, to line up for their dubbing: my photograph of Martin was taken in the porch of Gloucester Cathedral during his epic Land's End to John O'Groats bike ride in 2008. (I accompanied him for a short distance.)

That trip raised a satisfying amount for charitable purposes, but it doesn't begin to compare with Martin's other generosity over a long period: causes orchestral, operatic, scientific, environmental, educational... all have benefited enormously from Smith largesse. Never has an honour been better deserved!

Miserden

Edmund drove me up to Miserden this morning. We were meeting a friend for a walk, and looked forward to it being a testing one: we were all in need of overcoming the ill effects of Christmas.

It turned out, however, to be a brief road stroll, as said friend had forgotten his boots. (He had, to compensate, brought with him the keys of his wife's car, necessitating some tricky telephone negotiations whilst we walked.)

The triangular route ended by St Andrew's Church. This (right) is an intriguing Anglo-Saxon doorhead in the North wall. It sits above a modern (well, 14th Century) opening, known according to the guidebook as "the Devil's Doorway": the devil would apparently come in by the South door and leave by the North.

The church also contains some excellent early 17th Century monuments, including one of Sir William and Lady Sandys in Derbyshire alabaster: their clothes look particularly lifelike. None of us could imagine anyone having the skill to create such a memorial today, at whatever price.