Dress informal - please no lycra

These were our marching orders for lunchtime today, when summoned to the Star Bistro to celebrate cyclist John's 70th birthday. And a jolly occasion it was, with an excellent lunch. I had pan fried artichokes and salsify, venison pudding and (best of all) Star Pimm's jelly.

As well as speeches we had a sing-song etc. With four siblings, there was no lack of relatives, so we were lucky to be counted amongst a select group of friends.

Coberley bubbly

As last week, we were today only three Wednesday walkers. Though the sun was shining in Cheltenham, we hit the mist as we drove up Leckhampton Hill: it cleared as the morning went on. Happily, we were at lunch (at the Star Bistro) before it started raining much.

After climbing half a mile or so along the Cotswold Way, we swung down South of Hartley Farm and along its secret valley. Crossing the A436, our peace was shattered: my "Stay!" was heard as "Okay!", with near fatal consequences.

Having admired the Berkeley tombs in Coberley church, we found ourselves sitting down in the porch. Whereupon a bottle and glasses were conjured up, so we could drink to the health of a birthday-boy walker. A nice surprise, this convention, to me as a relative newcomer to the group!

As my photograph shows, the stained glass in front of which we sat was appropriate to the occasion: Arts and Crafts-looking, but in fact late 20th Century.

Clothes-horses

Probably to brighten up a dull month, the papers are currently full of pictures showing the latest fashions: ridiculous clothes on ridiculously thin women. But it's not only women - it seems - that are dressed up these days. Dogs and horses too are adorned in ways that were surely never the norm a few decades ago. Is it really colder now? These were just two of many horses togged up in the fields to the North of Greenway Lane this afternoon. I walked along this, once the main highway between Cirencester and Gloucester, on my way back from another lunchtime visit to the Star Bistro at Ullenwood.

This evening, I watched at last the DVD of Of Gods and Men, kindly lent to us. What a superb film! Niall Keenan has an excellent article about its illustration of the virtue of fortitude on Thinking Faith.

Crippets

Having become bogged down as I walked through Lott Meadow, I was happy to stay on the tarmac up as far as The Crippets on Wednesday: normally, I would pass through the Burley Fields deer park, but that could have been a quagmire. As it was, I saw that the deer park had been extended to the opposite side of the lane from these soggy sheep. (In one of the paddocks further down was a Jacob's, not polycerate but unicerate - a ewe-nicorn?)

My destination on this sunny morning was the Star Bistro, opened fairly recently at Ullenwood. It serves a very good lunch!