Tower of bauble

It's good when grandchildren can take over the decoration of the Christmas tree.

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.

Croft Farm Waterpark

Caroline booked the three grandchildren in for a kayaking session today, in a former gravel pit just North of Tewkesbury. Two hours was plenty. Having picniced at the waterside, and before our trio donned their wet suits, we were all entertained by ducks and swans on the look-out for food plus a gang of ice bucket challengers further down the bank.

I've been reading Alice in Wonderland to Ida. In view of current trends, too much "Off with their heads!" for my liking.

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.

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...

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.

Happy New Year!

...from a rainy Cheltenham: we are supposed to be on our way to watch Bristol Rovers v. Cheltenham Town at the ground which overlooks Agnes' house in Bristol; but for the second year running, it's been rained off. So, a lazy time at home is in prospect, with the grandchildren slow to get out of their pyjamas, and the youngest, Laurie (6) much enjoying his new camera.

Daisy's tea party

A full-blown birthday tea took place this afternoon in our kitchen: Ida's new bear was its focus, though assistance was needed to blow out the candle. I am (with Caroline) just about to abandon our domesticity for the first time in a week, donning black tie for a grown up dinner with friends near Tetbury. Often, we are happy at home, failing to see in the New Year, but for tonight we have had no less than three invitations.

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.)

Winter walking

In the sunshine (and through the mud), Caroline took us all up to a fallen oak tree on the side of Leckhampton Hill this morning. Sandwiches perched on top were the children's reward.

Reader's digest

Our eldest grandchild has his solitary moments, letting the other two play together. He's a great reader, thank goodness. Sarah gave him this one.

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.

Three seater

Caroline looked after the grandchildren again today (they were generally in high spirits), while Agnes and I were once more at Medicine Unboxed.

I found myself flagging by mid-afternoon, after a heavily political hour dominated by discussion of the "Semtex suppository inserted in the NHS by the Coalition." Ray Tallis, author of NHS SOS, came up with this and several other pithy phrases to sum up his view that the Health Service wasn't broke when the Tories took over, "and they tried to fix it by blowing it up."

He was supported by Professor Allyson Pollock, laying in to the BBC for its failure to alert the public to what was going on, and the vocal majority of the audience.

Earlier, Jocelyn Pook had talked about her strange compositions, inspired by ansafone messages. I could just about take these on board, but not the pieces consisting of voices running backwards: as with Eduardo Miranda's robotic music (he was on yesterday's programme), I kept thinking of those who use Photoshop to rob representational photographs of all meaning: you may as well set chimpanzees loose in the artist's studio.

This was the session when we came nearest to a consideration of the role God plays in people's lives: ecstatic singing was compared to prayer - without anyone "confessing" that it could indeed be prayer. I hid my light under a bushel. Shame.

I found myself surprisingly comfortable with psychoanalyst (and author of The Examined Life) Stephen Grosz talking to Sam Guglani: Grosz's conclusion about a bore was simply that "he didn't let the present matter." And the question put to him by his own (distinguished) analyst was, "When are you going to come in here by yourself?"

The other star of today's sessions was for me Eleanor Longden, reprising her TED talk about the voices in her head. "Don't ask what's wrong with you: ask what's happened to you," she urged.

What's happened to the England cricket team? One could certainly ask that.

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."

Family history

One of my fellow Wednesday walkers is married to an archivist who works at Cheltenham College on and off. She has kindly looked up the old records and come up with this splendid photograph. William has the same look on occasion to the team captain, we think: not surprising, as it's his great-grandfather.

A very modest man, it was therefore all the more interesting to find out that he had a distinguished early career. As well as singing bass in the choir, he won numerous art and other prizes: he also performed, aged 16, at his house mid-term entertainment - "mounted the platform and entertained us at the blackboard, skilfully converting rhombuses and parallelopipeds into frogs, beetles and other wonders of creation (talking amusingly to himself meanwhile).” It rings true!

Running out of steam

You tend to forget the origins of phrases like this. William and I had a reminder this morning, while visiting Toddington Station and the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway. From the window of the old carriage that serves as a museum, I photographed a volunteer bending his back to shovel the coal into the firebox of this '28xx' class heavy freight locomotive, built in 1905. Rescued from the scrapyard, it has been lovingly restored over a period of 29 years. Besides eating up coal, it needs 3,500 gallons of water to fill its tank.

Friendship Circle

The Western section of Cheltenham's Sandford Park used to have a clump of mature trees as one of its loveliest features. They were felled two decades or more ago, replaced by an inanimate "Friendship Circle". This consists of three blobs in cast iron by the South African artist Neville Gabie, intended to commemorate Cheltenham's various twinning links.

Like the Sophie Ryder I posted about last week, this piece of public art came in for a barrage of criticism at first: I joined the chorus of disapproval. But seeing it today I realised it had come to earn its keep - certainly more so than the sculpture in the Eastern section of the park, The Weathered Man, about which I wrote last December.

Maybe my change of mind was influenced by the grandsons discovering that one of the trio was hollow. "We are baby crabs in our mother's shell," said Laurie.