Didier Bourel

Caroline finds it hard to resist a pottery, and today's (chez M. Bourel) was a goodie it seems. Despite full panniers on our bikes, we somehow have to accommodate two new mugs on our way back to Plymouth on Saturday.

The ride to Lampaul-Guimiliau turned out to be easier than I expected. Not a single car passed us, as I can remember. After the pottery visit, we ate very well at Hotel des Enclos, and liked the Parish Close and church more than the better known ones at Guimiliau itself, nearby. But the hot weather continues, and two churches are quite enough for today thank you.

We just avoided colliding with a funeral at Lampaul-Guimiliau: three of the mourners sat at the next table in the restaurant. The priest was the same as said mass at Saint-Thegonnec on Sunday. "How many churches do you serve?" I asked him. "Four of us look after 23," said he.

Farewheel

Caroline has said a sad goodbye to her pottery wheel. With minimal hassle, it fitted very snugly into the car of friends who took it to a new home in London.

100 up

Agnes completed her 100th poem at home in Bristol between lunch and tea on the first day's play at Brisbane. More than satisfactory in both quarters: with Gift Aid, the 24-hour poetry slam will have raised the best part of £2,000 for the typhoon victims, whereas, in the cricket, Australia look to be pushed to reach the statutory 400 they might be said to need as a platform for a win in the First Test.

Everybody following our daughter's 24 hour burst of creativity has expressed amazement at the richness of her imagination. Let's hope the experience, as well as helping the needy, opens some doors for her!

Meanwhile, in London today, we managed a visit to Prue Cooper's show at Abbott and Holder. We have long admired her press-moulded earthenware pots, as quirky as they are useful. Her blurb says she likes to make "things that communicate through being used... the lettering being integral to the design in the same way that the words are integral to a song... We're bound together by stories."

My favourite in the present exhibition is this one photographed: I shall never now be able to listen with proper seriousness to Marcellus' questioning of Barnardo in the opening scene of Hamlet.

Earlier, at a cousins' lunch, I overheard part of a discussion about houses in the country, and the husband of one cousin asking another (female), never before encountered, "Is your seat large?"

Ray Finch RIP

This Christmas, for the first time in very many years, there had been no card bearing Ray's graceful handwriting; and now I hear of his "peaceful" death, on Wednesday.

More than 30 years ago, he was awarded the MBE: nobody could have worn his honour more modestly. He was an inspiration to generations of potters, as well as being one of the easiest people to love and respect. We first met in 1974, when I went to live within Winchcombe Catholic parish, of which Ray and his wife Muriel were quiet stalwarts. Muriel involved me in the formation of the town's overseas development project, a charity we called Save a starving village trust - an informal "twinning" of Winchcombe with Kanjianal in Bangladesh. The bowl Ray gave us for our wedding present remains one of our most treasured possessions - now alas, a little chipped. What a privilege it was to have known Winchcombe's most distinguished craftsman - indeed resident!

I took this photograph on 18th March 1993, the day Jodami won the Cheltenham Gold Cup.