Bretforton

An elderly neighbour died some months ago, having lacked the strength to do much gardening in his later years. As a result, wildlife flourished, and Sleeping Beauty's palace had a rival. The house has been sold recently, and it shouldn't have surprised us, therefore, to wake up this morning to the whine of a chain saw. Nevertheless, it's one of those sounds that always goes through you, trees being such precious objects. Not to mention the wildlife.

The other - more cheery - sound I awoke to was a very fresh take on the Today programme. Polly Harvey, guest producer, left her mark in no uncertain fashion, calling for assistance from John Pilger, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Julian Assange and other champions of the anti-establishment. The Mail and Telegraph have already sharpened their pencils.

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.

Around Northleach

As last Wednesday, the forecast was rain for this morning. Happily, it didn't materialise, and the five of us who set out to walk in a gentle anti-clockwise circle from Northleach stayed dry. Not only did the rain hold off, it was warm and intermittently sunny, as can be seen from my photograph, taken as we came back down into the Leach valley, looking forward to lunch.

We ate at the Sherborne Arms, our peace being interrupted by some continuous high-pitched barking a couple of tables away: the temptation to order a dog roll was hard to resist. By Winterwell Barn we had spotted rather more useful specimens of that ilk - four sheep dogs and a spaniel in the front of a pickup, overlooking (in the back) five sheep - a high pupil:teacher ratio.

Earlier, we chatted with the lone Stowell Park tractor man: born in nearby Withington in a bygone era, his CaseIH Steiger 485QT Quadtrac GPS-guided machine is a monster. Elsewhere than the Cotswolds, you could buy a house for what one costs. Weighing 24 tonnes and consuming 100 litres of fuel per hour, this vehicle is not something you look forward to meeting coming towards you on a country lane.

And a far cry from green economics: the other tractor man was "transitioned" when it arrived.

Before I left for Northleach, we had the Today programme on Radio 4. The Thought for the Day presenter was well upstaged by Celestina Mba an hour later, interviewed by Justin Webb.

Merton Council employed Celestina to work with needy children. At her interview, she had said she could not work on Sundays, as she was a Christian. "We can work around that," she was told, and was offered the job, which she accepted. But things changed, and the same man who interviewed Celestina told her, "We need you to work Sundays."

Justin Webb, who seemed perplexed by Celestina's stance, was told, calmly but impressively firmly: "You have to care for yourself, to be able to give care to other people. If I don't take care of my own spiritual being, I cannot give anybody anything. The reason that I work with them [autistic children] is because God enables me to work with them. It is not an easy job, but I enjoy what I do and believe I have so much to give them."

In other words, Nemo dat quod non habet.

Troy and destroy

John Bell was the speaker on Thought for the Day this morning. He came on immediately after someone salivating over the prospect of life on Mars. John reminded us that "Adam" meant "earthling", and that the earth does not belong to us, but we belong to it - by decree of its maker.

You feel this when kneeling on warm soil to plant garlic and onions, as I have been doing in this lovely spell of mild weather. Softneck Thermidrome garlic this year, and 500g of Troy onion sets - netted against the birds, who enjoy tweaking the sets out of the soil.

I was slow to fix the mesh tightly round our sprouting plantlets earlier, and the result is a plague of caterpillars. It's either I who go into destroy mode, or they who remain in it.

The Autumn raspberries don't look up to much either, but the late Summer canes (seven foot tall in some cases) are still fruiting plentifully. As are the beans and Caroline's tomatoes and figs. She even presented me with her first melon the other evening.

The back lawn is littered with apples, and both lawns are also littered with rose and other prunings: we need more room in the deep freeze for juice and a couple more brown bins.

I photographed these onions this time last year on our visit to the National Botanic Garden of Wales.

Blackberry Messenger

Someone must have given these cousins a message that there were blackberries around; from which you can tell that I am (a) dangerously facetious and/or (b) something of a mobile phone Luddite, certainly unfamiliar with apps. The other sort of BlackBerry must cost well over £100 a throw. So, the hoodlums organising the rioting in London and elsewhere, who seem to be using BM to coordinate their forces, are not exactly going to be on their uppers. Or perhaps the Blackberries themselves were looted?

Nausea quickly overtook me as I listened to the horrific news on the Today Programme this morning. So I turned to Radio 4 Extra, where I found a rerun of To the Manor Born. This is of course hiding one's head in the sand: there can be no peace without justice. Nevertheless, it's perhaps what David Cameron would like to have been able to do when advised to break his Italian holiday.

PS Thomas has drawn my attention to a brilliant post here by Rosamicula: don't be put off by the fact that you have to consent to reading adult content: there's no need for the warning on this particular post. Indeed, reading it should be compulsory.

Heart and Soul

James Naughtie and Boris Johnson discussed where to build new airport capacity this morning, with not a mention of climate change. It's this dislocation between business as usual and long-term realities that so distresses the environmentally-minded.

One network I find particularly helpful in coping with this is the CELprayer group. A passage, written by Henri Nouwen was recently posted here, as follows:

Building Inner Bridges

Prayer is the bridge between our conscious and unconscious
lives. Often there is a large abyss between our thoughts,
words, and actions, and the many images that emerge in our
daydreams and night dreams. To pray is to connect these two
sides of our lives by going to the place where God dwells.
Prayer is "soul work" because our souls are those sacred
centres where all is one and where God is with us in the
most intimate way.

Thus, we must pray without ceasing so that we can become
truly whole and holy.

This struck a chord with me following the initial gathering of the Transition Town Cheltenham Heart and Soul Group last Saturday: 13 of us turned up for what was an exhilarating meeting. Christians being, I would guess, in the minority, we have much to learn from those of another spirituality; and likewise much to share about our own tradition with those of different or no faith, but who are walking the same path as we are towards what we each know will be a very different future. (A mind map has now arrived with me, putting down some of our areas of concern.) Incidentally, Transition Town Cheltenham is the 349th official Transition initiative - and the 187th in the UK.

Along similar lines to our Heart and Soul discussions, I have recently admired this post by George Marshall, on the theme of the ingenious ways we avoid believing in climate change. (The videos are also available on YouTube.)