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.

Mountains and molehills

As I've mentioned, I am enjoying dipping into Roger Deakin's Notes from Walnut Tree Farm. "All that one asks of one's friends," he writes, "is that they remain one step ahead. To have them lagging behind risks plunging into banality." But how difficult it is, to retain a perspective between the trivial and the important. I was reflecting on this in the train back to Cheltenham this afternoon. In conversation, you can, if you're not careful, get as heated about England peeing on the pitch as Syria raining incendiaries onto a school playground. It's easy to forget there are always choices we can make about what we discuss.

Planning a walk from Stroud, you have basically two choices: a steep pull uphill to see something of the Cotswolds and look out over the Severn Vale, and a flat, shady trudge parallel to fairly busy roads, but with (in one direction) one of Gloucestershire's ace pubs as your goal. It is still warm and dry, but the visibility this morning wasn't great. As the two others I was meeting shared my thought that food and drink were as important as exercise, we opted for the second alternative, walking from Stroud Station to beyond Nailsworth mainly on the old railway line.

It's part of Sustrans' National Cycle Network, but we were not badly buzzed by bikes: all those that did come past had kindly "belled" us in good time. And it's an interesting walk, giving you a behind the scenes look at the area's industrial past. There are some high class graffiti in one of the tunnels, and a couple of sculptural signposts caught the eye. The natural world is well documented by displays posted at intervals.

By the time we reached Nailsworth, we were ready for our lunch. The look of a menu we passed offered a temptation to halt there, but the prices put us off so on we pressed along the Avening Road to our planned destination, the Weighbridge Inn. The look on my friend's face when his 2in1 pie arrived sums up the general happiness not to have been deflected into William's Kitchen.

Norganic neither

The charismatic Chris Beardshaw came to the Cotswold Playhouse Theatre in Stroud last evening, at the invitation of the Gloucestershire Organic Gardening Group: well though he talked about his career and background, the "O" word was notably absent during the enjoyable two hours (nearly) for which he spoke!

Both a plantsman and a garden architect, Chris clearly wanted us to know more about the architecture than the planting. Or rather the "choreography". How are we going to arrange our plants? He agreed with Gertrude Jekyll, they should be "like the thread in a tapestry." And he went on to talk of the gardener as the conductor of a great orchestra, controlling both the assemblage of blooms and their timing.

To walk down a well-planned herbaceous border was like exploring the nave of a cathedral, its columns (trees) supporting the roof and giving rhythm as you proceed towards the altar (gazebo?). Changing the metaphor yet again (this happened a lot), he spoke of the garden as a four-dimensional photograph album, as a strange stew, even as a pair of old slippers...

Stroud

We don't often go to Stroud, though it's only a dozen miles down the road. Today was my first visit to its celebrated Saturday market. We were too late getting there to sample it properly: this was because we had first been walking in Woodchester Park, then visiting Selsley Church on our way back.

It wasn't at all a bad day for walking, dry and windless for the most part. Our walk ended at the big, gaunt, never finished house, which wasn't open: peering through the windows you can still get a good idea of its astonishingly elaborate Victorian Gothic stonework. The three of us agreed it was a strange place to build such a pile, on the bottom of a narrow valley.

The churchyard at Selsley by contrast has one of the best views of any I know. And a complete set of Pre-Raphaelite stained glass atones for the rather dull church building - of much the same era (and ilk) as Woodchester Mansion. As you can see from the photograph, the Stroud street scene is somewhat different.

Stroud Coffehousing

I have not been a member of any political party since resigning, in the 1980s, from the Ecology Party. The Stroud branch of what is now the Green Party organises monthly Coffee House Discussions: I was invited along this evening, to contribute (on behalf of Christian Ecology Link) to a discussion on what different faiths teach about the environment. The Star Anise Arts Café was packed.

My two-pennyworth was as follows: Christianity is centred upon the person of Jesus Christ, born 2,000 years ago in a Palestinian town on the West Bank. We believe that Jesus was the son of God, who created the universe and all it contains. Jesus gave us two commandments: love God (and therefore his creation), and love our human neighbours as we do ourselves (and therefore live in justice). One of Jesus’ early followers, Basil, an Armenian, wrote: “The bread you do not use is the bread of the hungry: the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of the person who has no clothes: the shoes you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot.” All around us in the world today, we see the hungry and the destitute, more often than not victims of environmental neglect or unjust exploitation of the earth’s resources. Christians have the responsibility, therefore, to defend earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone, and to protect mankind against self-destruction. Our tradition is to pray to God for strength, to see things as they really are; to judge what needs to be done, and to act in accordance with that judgment. As one of the oldest forms of our prayer is praise, I read – to conclude – Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun.

Seven others spoke. There was a presentation on behalf of Green Spirituality, “possibly not a faith at all”: its protagonist leads a monthly “no faith” service, usually attended by some two dozen “non-members”. A Celtic Druid was followed by a Shakamuni Buddhist. There was a Jewish doctor and Haroon from the Gloucester Mosque. One lady, a Quaker, assured us you don’t have to be a Christian to be a Friend; whilst another, a Bahai, spoke of consciousness, coherence, unity and cooperation. Tonight, she said, everyone is saying the same thing. Well, perhaps not quite, if you listen.

"Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip"

This is the title of an 11-minute animated video made last Autumn by Leo Murray of the RCA. Here is a link to his site. I recommend it.

Yesterday, at the Gloucestershire Churches Environmental Justice Network meeting we heard about Transition Towns from the green economist Molly Scott Cato. She lives in nearby Stroud, which has followed Totnes down the Transition path. As Molly says, "We are in a situation of total unpredictability." Her message: we face the challenge of how to move to a steady-state economy. We have to respond positively, or succumb to fear and depression, our two great enemies. A Transition Town aims at becoming a more stable, resiliant society, whose members enjoy closer, more convivial relationships within their community. We can start by smiling at people we pass in the street.