The Royal Oak

The only pub locally well recommended by the Good Pub Guide is the Royal Oak in Prestbury, which used to be run by Tom Graveney. In all my years living in these parts, I had never been there till yesterday.

We booked a table for lunch. 12 or 1.45, we were told: I chose the latter, but it was 2.15 before food arrived. Clearly, it's an institution at lunchtime on a Sunday, the bar being thronged, and people playing cards and reading the papers. But the service was cool, when we wanted it to be attentive, and the food wasn't brilliant. Not somewhere I'll rush back to therefore.

Today, in the morning sunshine I finished the main ladder work on our hornbeam hedge, with the blackbird singing: here he is above Old Father Time on the neighbours' summer house.

Glenfallen

For over two decades, Glenfall House operated as the Gloucester Diocesan retreat centre. A month ago, it closed its doors. I am sad about this, having been closely involved with Glenfall from the '80s until a while after the retreat house opened.

I remember particularly the opening ceremonies on 27th June 1992, with a Eucharist presided over by Gloucester's short-lived Bishop Peter on the sunny terrace in front of the house, the gardens falling away towards fields below, full of ancient oak trees. Nuns of the Society of St Peter had been there before, and I have the memory of a frail Sister Mary Margaret, delighted to be back at her former convent home and sitting on a bench eating strawberries and cream. It's disconcerting that this comes back so clearly, at a time when I now find myself putting the red wine away in the fridge.

Before the nuns, Glenfall was the home of Mary Williams and her farmer son Anthony: they hosted the occasional Old Amplefordian gathering there, which I organised shortly after arriving in Gloucestershire in 1973. The early 19th Century villa had been radically altered a century later, with beer money. Arts and Crafts plasterwork (Peter Waals), woodwork (Sidney Barnsley) and metalwork (Norman Jewson) is to be seen both inside and out. The arch of a Cotswold stone garden grotto is echoed by Jewson's field gate, which I walked past today, at the Southern extremity of the surrounding estate.

Edgar, Patrick, Martin and I had met near Sainsbury's at 9:30 and set off parallel to Harp Hill on a misty but warm morning. I had the idea that it was possible to walk right up part of the eponymous glen (deep and steep), but we ended up just crossing it on a rickety bridge.

Though the grounds seem to be well tended, the house itself looks sadly abandoned, with plasterwork in need of repair. Just beyond the drive's iron railings, a hawk was dismembering some creature larger than itself: a bird of prey, where once there had been birds of pray.

Currant state of play

We forgot the excitement of the Lions' rugby triumph and Murray's Wimbledon, a week ago, in the fever surrounding the England win in the first Ashes test yesterday - a fever more concentrated because of the game's intense fluctuations over its five days. 11 o'clock came and went this morning with a distinct feeling of anti-climax, and still we have three days to wait before another round of cricketing battle with the old enemy commences.

Meanwhile, our blackbird has relocated her old nest: we moved it from by the back door into the store in our sunless area, and she is once more sitting on eggs. And Caroline is battling with the the currant glut, trusting to her painting stool, with its canvas much in need of replacing. "Do you suffer from the tyranny of fruit?" Tamara Talbot Rice was wont to ask.

Five babies

This is the nest on a shelf just outside our back door. The eggs our blackbird was sitting on are now hatched, and there is much fetching and carrying of worms!

New tenant

Today, I've been planting potatoes - Pink Fir Apple - having collected some bags of manure from a nearby horsiculturalist. Perfect weather for digging! The tulips are still at their best, as is the Magnolia: we were worried they would be over while we were away. With the house empty for much of that time, Mrs. Blackbird has built a nest on the shelf above the gumboots just outside our back door: four eggs so far.

Ponte Ulla

Today I was meaning to go a bit nearer to my goal than in fact I managed. It´s an easy walk until the last bit, but that involves climbing 200m within 4 kms. As a gang of other walkers were sitting in the sunshine lunching late at the bottom of the hill, I joined them: the lunch was a good one, especially the fish - you can tell we are getting nearer the sea. Generous quantities of wine were thrown in, and that made it an easy decision to stay the night in a room above the restaurant. I´m not the only one to change their plans, and reserve the steep bit for the fresh air of the morning: we should still be in Santiago by early afternoon.

Ponte Ulla is a small town on the North side of quite a sizeable river. I´m sitting not far away from the end of the (local) road bridge, and can see the motorway bridge high above, further upstream. Downstream, the view is dominated by two even more enormous viaducts, one for the original railway (still very much running) and the other for the rare AVE trains that thunder by occasionally between Santiago and Ourense (rarae aves indeed - I haven´t heard one all day).

There´s been plenty of real birdlife on this Camino, especially since entering Galicia. As usual I find I don´t know many of the names, but more often than not I´m woken at cock-crow. The cuckoo is omnipresent. I´ve seen hawks and heard woodpeckers at work, and then of course there are the cranes. So, what with that and all the varieties of animals, trees and flowers, I have enjoyed these three weeks plus as much for being in the natural world as for anything else the pilgrimage has brought me.

"Freedom"

In a family of cat lovers, it's hard to express anti-feline feeling; so I much enjoyed being able to read aloud a passage from Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" to the family during our holiday (on which Thomas even brought along his cat). The riff comes towards the end of this marvellous book, where our hero, Walter is seen as "a nutcase and a menace" for wanting to protect the songbirds around the lake - where his family have been coming over generations - from the domestic pets brought in by the households in the new development, Canterbridge Estates. "The older cat owners on the street did politely accept the [coloured neoprene cat] bibs and promise to try them, so that Walter would leave them alone and they could throw the bibs away."

Franzen's gift is to be able to see the funny side of any serious argument. And so the book cavorts along through its nearly 600 pages treating all manner of particularly green issues in a highly entertaining way. I enjoyed it even more than his earlier masterpiece, "The Corrections".

One & other

Six weeks having elapsed from my bike accident, I have at last been released from wearing the Big Boot Cheltenham Hospital gave me to protect my broken foot. So, to celebrate, I took my new bike with me on the train to London yesterday. And I couldn't resist a detour to Trafalgar Square, to see for myself - rather than via the webcam - what One & other was all about.

Shortly before the accident, when I was cycling through Yorkshire, I visited Harewood House, where I found myself almost alone inside while viewing great portraits by the likes of Titian and Veronese. Outside, however, the crowds were thickly gathered - in the bird garden! The twittering and tweeting of our feathered friends behind netting was clearly of much wider interest to the general public than acclaimed likenesses of great historical figures. And so it seems to be in Trafalgar Square since One & other started life last Monday: the crowds around the 4th Plinth no doubt comfortably exceed those looking at any of the celebrated portraits in the National Gallery a few yards away. Those on the plinth all seem to be tweeting on Twitter, whilst we on the other side of the netting shout encouragement - just as we do to get the Harewood penguins to flap their wings - or our abuse.