His and hers

His wife, her bower, his beans, her flowers, his mother's urns, her pond...

I've just finished reading Restoration by Rose Tremain. I see that in fact I read it before, 12 years ago - not that I remember much. My (re)reading was prompted by finding a copy at the house in which I stayed for a week last month, and borrowing it from there, thinking also that Caroline would want to read it: it's currently her book club book. I also thought it would be interesting to compare its writing with that of the sequel, which I enjoyed reading last year.

Two decades separate Merivel from Restoration, which now feels rather ponderous, though the recurring motif of hindsight in reverse remains a charming conceit. I love this passage, genuinely prophetic, written as it was in 1989. "I dreamed, last night, a most infamous dream. I was in a high chamber at Whitehall where a clutch of gallants and their women, together with the King and Queen, were assembled. Why are we all come here? I asked one I recognised as Sir Rupert Pinworth. Why... for the wedding. Naturally. At that moment, the crowd moved to make a pathway for the bride and groom... And then I saw their faces... And I saw that it was indeed... two women whom the priest had married... And Sir Rupert leaned over and whispered in my ear: You see what marriage is become. It is become anything we make it be. And I woke up very hot and troubled."

Tanglewood

Souvenir de Claudius Denoyel was one of the climbing roses I planted on our boundary wall 15 years ago. As my photograph shows, it needs thinning out. The trouble is, it's grown too tall, even for me, and it's tangled in with the Philadelphus Virginalis. Just another for my long list of Winter gardening jobs.

Today has been mild again, but windy, and there's been more heavy rain at times - more flooding for many, I suspect. In fact there's little good news to be had: the ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians seems fragile; you have to search to find coverage ahead of the Doha UN Climate Change Conference (COP18), while the BBC still hogs its own headlines. What's more I feel sad for having finished my book: "Merivel" is an enjoyable read, once you've got used to the overdose of Capital Letters; and even that is very much part of its cleverness as a work of imagination. I didn't much enjoy the last Rose Tremain I read, "The Road Home": this latest work exudes more compassion.

@ Paice

Richard hosted yesterday's book group meeting. As at our last session, six weeks ago, we were fairly evenly divided about the merits of our choice, The Road Home, by Rose Tremain. Two of us were reminded that we had read her earlier Restoration, and hadn't much enjoyed that either. I for one was baffled that The Road Home should have won the 2008 Orange Fiction Prize: it must have been a bad year. A book with a large hole in the middle, I felt: the main character was a cipher.

We have gone for non-fiction next time: Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau: a sea and its meanings. This ties in with the new-found celebrity of Alaska's lipsticked pitbull Governor, and echoes one of our earliest choices The Black Sea when Steve first convened our group, four years ago this month.

The cover of Passage to Juneau includes a puff with a reminder of our last book: "Adrift in foreign lands, eternally questioning the concept of home, Raban crafts a more immaculate, shipshape habitation out of the language than almost all his contemporaries." It's an excerpt from a FT review. The reviewer? Rose Tremain.

I'm not sure when we shall be able to meet next: Richard is usually away in October, and he and Simon were encouraging me to firm up a vague plan to go InterRailing - which means we would be away till late November. We shall see.

Before our book discussion, we were looking forward to a visit to the Moreton Show. With all this rain, though, it would have been a sea of mud so, not surprisingly, it was cancelled. We went instead to the recently-opened Court Barn Museum in Chipping Campden.

A couple of years ago, Richard had taken us round the Court Barn when it was still at the development stage. We were all immensely impressed with the finished product: the displays pull together comprehensively the major contribution the Arts & Crafts movement has made to the life of the Cotswolds. And happily, when there we bumped into one of those most responsible for helping people to appreciate it, Mary Greensted.

But we worried for the Museum's future success. It suffers from real lack of visibility: how can its landlords, the Landmark Trust be persuaded to be more flexible on this front? Would some form of laser projection on the adjoining wall be possible?

Almost the highlight of our day: Richard took us (and his Airedale) round Monique's and his wonderful garden - and the rain stopped.