Sagittarius Rising

Cecil Lewis' book about his flying experiences in World War I and shortly afterwards was chosen by our Book Club's newest member and chewed over today. We liked it.

Part of the book's charm is its frequent digression into something more akin to poetry than real-life Biggles. "Many times have I been carried away," Lewis writes, "by the unexpected beauties of the foreign scene. But, finally, a man comes home. For nowhere else, I think, does the beech grow just so, noble and straight, crowning the rounded hill."

After the lunchtime discussion, we adjourned to look over the former Cirencester Brewery complex, of which LoCo Glass occupies part. Colin Hawkins made us welcome. Interesting to compare their contemporary British studio work with painted glass of five centuries earlier, such as this St Lawrence fragment in the South Sanctuary window of the great Parish Church, which we wandered round before lunch.

Another part of the Brewery is home to Dorothy Reglar's Colours of Asia. The cloth that Dorothy uses to create her designs is produced on handlooms in Laos - she visits each year: again, her beautiful clothes were a contrast to the richly-decorated blue velvet cope on display in the church - made in 1478.

Yet again, a mild day, and dry. Before catching my bus, I was raking leaves.

Ashleworth

I had intended that we should walk in Eldersfield parish, and lunch at the Butcher's Arms there, but they can't apparently do dishes without garlic - so, no good for one of the trio of us out today. Instead, we drove to nearby Ashleworth and lunched at The Queens Arms there - excellent food and very accommodating on the allergy front.

Ashleworth feels spread out as a village: we never seemed far away from housing, but it wasn't obtrusive, and some of the architecture was interesting, a mixture of brick and stone. The tithe barn, of course, is magnificent, but the church next door was worth exploring too. Hard to get a photograph of it, though, as the graveyard is a jungle.

Inside, you can see the glorious mixture of styles so typical of our village churches. I liked particularly this fragment of mediaeval glass, representing the beloved disciple.

Both barn and church were deliciously cool on yet another Indian Summer day.

Cranham

If there's an award for the least-twee Cotswold village, Cranham must be in the running. We four walkers parked up from the pub today, and did a circuit which virtually beat the parish's bounds.

The church, restored by Sidney Gambier Parry, looks ordinary from outside, but within contains treasures: a pair of mysteriously dark paintings depicting miracles in the nave, an early 16th Century German reredos, some fine stained glass from the Powell workshop either side of the Chancel.

The mud was manageable on a warm, mainly sunny morning - perfect for resumption of exercise: it was the first Wednesday walk for four weeks. From the Common, our path led past Haregrove, complete with its hare weathervane: this photograph was taken from the drive. I wonder who lives there? Not Lily Allen: we passed her house at Overton a little later on our walk, stepping aside for the Sainsbury's van careering down her drive. It was followed shortly by the Royal Mail. Surely a sensible privatisation would have seen Sainsbury's bidding to deliver letters alongside its frozen peas?

A pig and a poke

Scrubditch Farm hosts a variety of activities, but we only saw this one Old Spot as we walked through this morning. Patrick attempted to draw its attention to the apples which lay behind, but to no avail.

The rain came down upon the four of us in earnest soon afterwards, so we were glad to find St Margaret's Church in Bagendon open - a dry haven for a while, and surprisingly warm. It turned out that a funeral was due to take place there this afternoon, and the parish was clearly determined it shouldn't lead on to others: the building was almost warm enough for a cremation.

The stained glass is varied: good fragments from the 15th Century; indifferent 19th Century Hardman, but excellent Christopher Whall from the early 20th.

There are many fine houses in and around the villages and hamlets in this part of the Cotswolds, it seems. And much horsiculture.

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.

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."

Coberley bubbly

As last week, we were today only three Wednesday walkers. Though the sun was shining in Cheltenham, we hit the mist as we drove up Leckhampton Hill: it cleared as the morning went on. Happily, we were at lunch (at the Star Bistro) before it started raining much.

After climbing half a mile or so along the Cotswold Way, we swung down South of Hartley Farm and along its secret valley. Crossing the A436, our peace was shattered: my "Stay!" was heard as "Okay!", with near fatal consequences.

Having admired the Berkeley tombs in Coberley church, we found ourselves sitting down in the porch. Whereupon a bottle and glasses were conjured up, so we could drink to the health of a birthday-boy walker. A nice surprise, this convention, to me as a relative newcomer to the group!

As my photograph shows, the stained glass in front of which we sat was appropriate to the occasion: Arts and Crafts-looking, but in fact late 20th Century.

Cycle Norfolk

We are staying in rural Norfolk, having come here by train and bike today. There was over an hour between our supposed arrival into Paddington and our departure from King's Cross, ample time, I thought, to bike between the two along the Regent Canal towpath, our most tranquil route. But the Cheltenham train came in late, and it was slow going through the rain, so we ended up having to run the length of platform 11 to catch our connection. Then we had to squeeze our bikes in between the end carriage doors, there being zero other provision, this despite the service feeding Cambridge, Ely, King's Lynn, the most cycling-friendly part of England. (As Amanda tells Elyot,"Very flat, Norfolk.")

King's Lynn merits further exploration, but we much enjoyed what we had time to see of the old town, whizzing round the outsides of Clifton House (with its 18th Century barley sugar columns either side of the front door and extraordinary Tudor tower at the rear), the Guildhall, the Old Gaol, the Custom House and the so-called St Nicholas' Chapel (almost the size of a small cathedral). It was St Margaret's Minster that impressed me most though. Not just the Norman West front: the 13th/14th Century arcading and brasses too - but also the modern crucifix above the pulpit, altar frontal and stained glass in the large N-W window under the tower. A vibrant church!

We were glad to complete our 15 miles here before dark, and get out of the rain. This after only a minor detour - not bad considering I had no proper map. As my photograph shows, our kind hostess, a very old friend, has begun to look uncannily like Basil Hume. He was never, to my knowledge, a cat-lover: she gave us a cat as a wedding present.

Bishop Frank

Your Holiness,

Congratulations on your election as Pope, and I hope your new job won't turn out to be a poisoned chalice - either self-administered, or slipped to you by some corrupt member of your household (the fate which was surmised to have befallen your predecessor but two).

Although I am addressing this to "Your Holiness" - in traditional mode - I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't prefer a less lofty title, judging by the way you introduced yourself from the balcony last evening. "Brothers and sisters, good evening." What a delightful beginning!

Sam Jones had a long piece in last Saturday's Guardian about cardinals who made up the electoral college. "Then there are those who find fame for other reasons," he wrote. "Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit intellectual and Archbishop of Buenos Aires who travels round town by bus and told his compatriots not to waste their money on plane tickets to Rome to see him become a cardinal, but to give it instead to the poor..." My heart leapt to read this: someone who walked the talk!

And then what a great name to choose! I photographed a "St Francis" stained glass window when visiting St Alphege's Church in Solihull last month: here is a detail. You can see the saint's stigmata - reminding us of the cross Christians have to bear - and the wolf (the Curia?) alongside the rabbit (us in our pews) and the robin (Reliant? - the new Popemobile?).

I groaned when the news came of Joseph Ratzinger's election: last night, though, I was fighting back tears of joy. You are an answer to many prayers!

Syde three

As I indicated earlier in the year, the interior of Syde church doesn't possess much of interest: this 50-year-old window however is a little unusual: the Virgin and child being adored by three mini shepherds charmed me somewhat at least, leave aside the gooey facial expressions.

We were in Syde again today for an early evening concert in the 16th Century (?) Tithe Barn which abuts the churchyard. The standard was high: Trio Aquilon played two big pieces, the "Archduke" and the virtuoso Ravel work - preceded by a couple of rather beautiful fragments by Lili Boulanger. Violinist Eulalie Charland introduced it all delightfully, enhancing our enjoyment, making us forget the downpour we had to cope with on our way up there.

The whole evening (invitations, car parking, programme, audience mix, informality, even including interval wine...) marked a most auspicious start to the generous Neubauers' new venture.

Toddington

I called at Toddington this morning for a couple of reasons, one of which was to photograph the church as part of my Gloucestershire Churches project. Not for many years had I turned off the B4077 down the lane leading to St Andrew's - which I don't ever recall going inside before. We went past once, many moons ago, to look at the adjacent Manor from the outside: then, it was in a relatively early state of neglect - very soon, matters became a lot worse, until Damien Hurst bought the estate a year or two back. The whole of the Manor is now swathed in scaffolding, awaiting a new incarnation as an art gallery - assuming Hurst doesn't go the same way as Timon of Athens.

Like the Manor, Toddington church is vast and rather forbidding. But the oak hammerbeam roof looks magnificent on a bright morning such as today's: there's not much stained glass to darken the interior, and what's there stimulated little excitement in me. A large chapel to the North contains white marble effigies of the ancestors of our former guide - the 1st Lord Sudeley and his Tracy missus, dating from the late 19th Century, yet in the style of the 14th. So, one can't help wondering what if any impact Hurst might have upon "his" church in due course.

Coming away, I spotted this relic of the past. There are not many fingerposts left in Gloucestershire - I tried to capture some of the plainer variety by photographing them a couple of decades ago, before they were replaced.

Birmingham

Yesterday, my book group met in the salubrious surroundings of the Birmingham Art Gallery & Museum restaurant. Not the hautest cuisine, but adequate: we missed our usual pints of bitter. Breaking with tradition, we discussed The Book over lunch, rather than tea. It was the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall: Bring up the bodies didn't grab all of us as firmly as it did me, but we seemed to agree that it was worth looking at. Shall I buy volume 3 when it appears? Probably.

Why Birmingham? Because Peter, our newest member, is full of enthusiasm for its examples of Arts & Crafts architecture. So, after we'd looked round some of the galleries and finished our book discussion, he led us down Edmund Street, Margaret Street, Newhall Street and Colmore Row, ending up at St Philip's.

Having admired the late Burne-Joneses there, we went across to St Martin's to look at the very different earlier window by him, saved by a whisker from destruction in World War II.

My companions were taken aback by Selfridge's, hovering over the Bull Ring, but even more by the new Library, to be opened next September, but now already dominating the East end of Broad Street. For my part, the excitement was this (photographed) new kinetic installation in the oculus of the Museum's new History Gallery - by Keiko Mukaide and Ronnie Watt: it was unveiled earlier this year. And whose is the amazing stained glass window on the stairs behind it, without any label?

Lower Strensham

It's that time of year when wild cyclamen put in their surprise appearance: we have a few at home, in the long grass by one of our entrance gateposts. And here's a photograph of many more, which I took on Friday outside St Peter and St Paul, Lower Strensham. Quite a job, it is, to track down this church, though it is hardly more than a stone's throw from the M5. You go along a single-track lane for about a mile, and when you eventually reach the redundant church, you rather wonder whether it's worth the effort.

To start with, it doesn't look much from the outside; and it's kept locked, so the question arises: how do you get in? I was lucky, in that someone happened to be there to show me where the key was kept.

Once inside, it's a different story: the wood- and stonework are magnificent. And there is a "Good Samaritan" window by an artist new to me, Florence Camm (1874-1960), a pupil of Henry Payne. She spent all her life in Smethwick, running a successful stained glass company with her two brothers - and this at a time when women artists and designers were struggling to be taken seriously.

A bonus day

"Fair and rather mild. Good bye fair twenty-ninth for another four years." This is how my ancestor, Peter Davis opened his diary entry in 1836. I am preparing a talk on it, to be given to the church's 55+ Club tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, to mark today (when the weather was much the same as in 1836) with something unusual, I biked to Warden Hill, Badgeworth and Shurdington, to look at their three churches. This is one of Tom Denny's sensational windows in St Christopher's, Warden Hill - "The Ravens", made in 1986. It's inspired by the Western Counties of Ireland, where ravens are common, and Luke, 12:24, "Think of the ravens: they neither sow nor reap; they have no storehouse or barn; yet God feeds them. You are worth far more than the birds."

"Travelling Light"

We were attracted to the latest National Theatre cinema relay by the presence in the cast of Anthony Sher. Nicholas Wright's play title reflects the imagined passage of a Lumière camera from deep in Eastern Europe to the West coast of America, transported by our hero, the orphaned son of a forgotten Jewish cinema pioneer. Sonny and Sher both, however, disappointed last night: Damien Molony looks good, but his wooden acting in the final scenes was exposed by the close ups. Sher's magnetism, so attractive when first we went to see him at Stratford, has now it seems worn off. But worst of all Travelling Light, for all its large cast and Hytner's elaborate production, has none of that true lightness The Artist has, a film echoing a similar era but with more finesse and magical delight.

Nor would Travelling Light work as a film: indeed, the best parts of the evening were the alienation effect of seeing a film of a play about a film, and the discussion at the end - in which (as Emma Freud pointed out) the author was the only gentile.

The stained glass - photographed in 2008 (in Oxford's Christ Church Cathedral) - looks like Kempe: another young Jewish boy on the run.

Dorchester Abbey

On Saturday, I photographed this detail from a late 13th/early 14th Century glass roundel in the Dorchester Abbey chancel's SE window - "reputedly the oldest stained glass in England, possibly inported from a church in France," according to Simon Jenkins. The two characters could almost have emerged from a 20th Century cartoon strip. The window sits beneath an elaborately carved sedilia, and opposite the magnificent Jesse window - greatly trickier to photograph. Discovering the Abbey's rich chancel was unexpected: the nave (and indeed the exterior) seemed unpromisingly austere, particularly given that preparations were in full swing for that evening's concert by Showaddywaddy. "Who are they?" I asked: well, according to the pre-publicity, "they have long been established as Europe's most successful ever exponents in the art of rock and roll. 23 Top 40 hit singles including 10 Top 5 hits (Under The Moon Of Love, When, I Wonder Why, 3 Steps To Heaven, Hey Rock and Roll.....), 15 massive selling albums - including 3 multi-platinum, over 50 Top of the Pops appearances..." and so it goes on - under my radar.

Stroud

We don't often go to Stroud, though it's only a dozen miles down the road. Today was my first visit to its celebrated Saturday market. We were too late getting there to sample it properly: this was because we had first been walking in Woodchester Park, then visiting Selsley Church on our way back.

It wasn't at all a bad day for walking, dry and windless for the most part. Our walk ended at the big, gaunt, never finished house, which wasn't open: peering through the windows you can still get a good idea of its astonishingly elaborate Victorian Gothic stonework. The three of us agreed it was a strange place to build such a pile, on the bottom of a narrow valley.

The churchyard at Selsley by contrast has one of the best views of any I know. And a complete set of Pre-Raphaelite stained glass atones for the rather dull church building - of much the same era (and ilk) as Woodchester Mansion. As you can see from the photograph, the Stroud street scene is somewhat different.

"A celebration of Shropshire agriculture"

Paul Dobraszczyk, Andy Wigley, James Bowen, Douglas Grounds, Pamela Sambrook and I were the speakers at this rather interesting day meeting, organised by the Shropshire and Marches Georgian Group. I spoke first, about The Diary of a Shropshire Farmer: it must have been pretty well-received, as I only came back with one copy of the book left unsold. We stayed with friends a little way South of Culmington Village Hall, where the event took place: as we were going to be rather early arriving, we made a minor detour up the lane from the A49 in Bromfield, to take a look at King's Head Farm. The Diarist lived there throughout the 1850s, and indeed my great-grandfather was born there. The place looks a bit desolate today. Culmington village is a surprise: at first you think it must be all along the main road, but tucked away to the East are a number of black and white houses and farm buildings, together with a curious church (All Saints), with Saxon origins clearly visible and a Kempe-like St Michael in one of the South Nave windows. We left before the end, to travel home mainly by daylight, and were rewarded by a remarkable sunset over Ludlow.

The new mass wording

Yesterday - the feast of St Gregory - was an appropriate day to go for some "training" about the new mass wording. It's been handed down to us, somewhat controversially, from the Vatican: was Pope St Gregory equally authoritarian in his day? (In this mid-19th Century stained glass image, from one of the windows in our Cheltenham St Gregory's Church, he is seen instructing Augustine and six other Benedictine monks, before their departure for England in AD 597.)

Jenny Baker, from Catholic Faith Exploration, led the training at Sacred Hearts Hall: I thought she spoke well on the whole, starting with an examination of what baptism is all about: really, she said, the Anglican "Christening" is a better word, denoting the conferring of authority to exercise ministry, that is to be Christ-like. "All ministry is ministry of humble service, with Christ as the model," she reminded us. Hospitality is a non-negotiable element in the life of the Church: not an innovation! We need to risk rebuff, and recall Hebrews 13:2, "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

Good to concentrate on this, and in doing so I expect we shall soon learn to accept many of the infelicities of the new translation.

The Wiltshire Cotswolds

Out with a regular, but infrequent walking companion today, we set off from Kemble Station on a warm if overcast morning across the stubble to Oaksey. From there we veered West, aiming for lunch at The Potting Shed in Crudwell; but we went wrong somewhere along the way. So, trespassing, we brought ourselves up in front of this charming farmhouse, one of many substantial properties we saw with a distinctly Cotswold flavour albeit in Wiltshire. Its new owner, into horsiculture rather than farming, rightly chastised us.

Our food venue was excellent, this gastropub having gone through the usual gentrification process in recent years. (It's made a cheap lunch out now seem rather a distant prospect.)

Curiously, each of the churches we saw - Kemble, Oaksey and Crudwell - is dedicated to All Saints. In the latter we came across some interesting 15th Century glass depicting the sacraments and a rather startled-looking Risen Christ in pink, still wearing his crown of thorns.