Shop local

Another posting on the Christian Ecology Link bulletin board, worth repeating, I thought - this time from Pete Redwood on the subject of supermarkets passing on unsold meat to be burnt:

Sainsbury's have also recently signed a contract with DPM at Doncaster to supply them with all their waste food to fuel their energy generation plant. This includes all fresh food waste. DPM specialises in producing material for pet food and already takes waste from retail butchers, cafes and restaurants within a 100-mile
radius of Doncaster. The new plant is an extension of that business, covers a number of supermarkets and feeds its electricity into the National Grid.

The question was posed, "Why so much waste?". The supermarket model creates waste by definition. In order to maintain an "attractive" display it is necessary to have more stock than can be realistically sold. As soon as the display starts to look empty sales drop.

The sell-by date system also creates a huge amount of waste. It is not a legal requirement in itself, but once shown on a package the retailer must comply with it. It has become standard practice by default rather than by legislation. Most food is still edible well beyond its sell-by date.

It is also worth remembering that most national supermarket chains do not sell truly fresh food. Due to the distribution process it is at least three days old, and usually more, before it even gets on the shelf! Which is why they insist on so many synthetic preservatives in their products.

Until about ten years ago most fresh products were supplied to each store direct by the producers/manufacturers. Each supermarket company insisted that it was supplied on a sale or return basis, and then deliberately over-ordered by one-third. Except for bread, and possibly milk in some cases, this system has now changed and all products are now supplied to a central distribution depot. Manufacturers and producers still cover the cost of waste by the grossly unfair discount structure operated by the main supermarkets.

Home

Two films exist with this title. (Perhaps more.) The latest - starring Isabelle Huppert - has been described as a "rather beautiful eco parable from Ursula Meier." I hope to see it one day, but this seems unlikely to be at our Cheltenham Cineworld.

Meanwhile, I've been watching the other (current) Home - at home, on the computer. It's a 93-minute documentary film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, with the most beautiful photography of our world from the air. It also has the most annoying soundtrack, but that is easily eliminated by turning the volume off and the subtitles on. Well worth watching!

Challenging the consumerist ethic

Tony Emerson has posted this on the Christian Ecology Link bulletin board: worth repeating, I thought.

We need to be challenging the consumerist ethic. The marketing processes adopted by modern business are at a level of sophistication undreamt of previously. Advertising is only the tip of this iceberg - market research, motivational research, 'sexy' product design, packaging, product placement, viral marketing, the availability of easy credit, corporate lobbying... these are only a selection of the techniques used either to create or to shape artificial demand, create (artificial) replacement demand or create addictive or dependency-induced repeat demand.

Small environmental movements cannot even think of matching the resources used in such processes. But we can adopt a range of approaches or techniques to undermine their unnecessary consumption-promoting strategy.

First, always challenge the economic dogma that 'consumer demand' is something natural and spontaneous: JK Galbraith exposed that myth 50 years ago, but Governments still base their policy on it, and say 'environmental action should be confined to technology of production.'

Many environmental campaigners also go along with the dogma. So, the need for the journey, the need for living in a particular size house in a particular location, the need for heating your house to 26 degrees C, the need for changing your clothes with the fashion, the need for a particular meat diet… : these are all 'spontaneous' and 'natural'. We are 'arrogant, elitist killjoys, would-be cavemen' if we challenge this dogma. 'We must wait for a new magic generation of green machines to come on the market.'

We have to take that risk of unpopularity - nothing new here for Christians.

Secondly: we need to discuss more how we best challenge the economic dogma of (spontaneous) consumer demand. We can sound as if we are rather elitist, effectively accusing people of being silly or foolish. One principle is that it is easier to challenge someone if you have built up a trusting, mutually-respecting relationship with them. This does make it easier to get an effective environmental programme going in a Christian community, where hopefully we have developed such relationships.

Welcome?

Some while ago, I appointed myself as Welcomer at the mass I usually go to: what this means is that I arrive a bit early to hand out mass books. (Having to get to church on time has always been a strain for me: my grandfather's description of our family's churchgoing was "Once a week and late at that!")

Most people seem pleased to be Welcomed, I find, though some defiantly look away. And I remain a little diffident, as I know that there are even priests who are not in favour of Welcoming.

Anyway, my diffidence is mitigated by an article I have just read, which - kind permission of both author, The Rev. David Deboys, and publisher - I set out here:

Why do we do what we do? Why do we believe what we believe? What is the inter relationship between experience and belief? These are not small questions, but I want to focus them on one particular issue: how we welcome people into church. My answer, simply and starkly, is that welcoming people into church is a gospel imperative. Not to welcome people is a denial of the Gospel. I want to engage with these assertions from family experience and from theology.

Our perceptions are coloured by our experiences. I moved to my present parish in west London on the Feast of Christ the King, 2008. A family member moved to another part of London at around the same time. For six Sundays she worshipped in a well-known parish church. No one spoke to her. No one said hello. No one made the slightest attempt to make her welcome. She was very upset by her experience. She was seeking a place to worship and become part of a community. That wasn’t on offer. Her experience has reinforced my theological commitment to making.

It seems to me that the New Testament bears the scars of the rejection of Jesus. Carol services will often climax in the reading of the first chapter of St John’s gospel. Verse 11 reads: “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” There it is, no welcome. Indeed the lack of welcome leads to the Calvary of rejection and Crucifixion. And the first Christians, in deliberate counterpoint to that, stressed welcome. The note of welcome permeates the New Testament. The two on the road to Emmaus find that the stranger in their midst is none other than the risen Christ – but they would not have discovered this if they had not welcomed him into their home. The Epistle to the Hebrews stresses the need to welcome strangers (13: 2): “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

But welcome in a twenty-first-century parish needs some subtlety. I have no truck with buttonholing those who cross the threshold. Our welcome must be genuine, but allow people to melt away quietly at the end of the service if that is their wish.

At my church of St Barnabas in Ealing we have introduced a team of badged welcomers to befriend any newcomer who is loitering after the service, or who actually stays behind to share coffee. However, this takes us back to the question that needs to be asked: what undergirds our welcome of other people?

(First published in The Tablet)

Requiescat

The family feline has died - yesterday aged 13. He is interred under the ceanothus by the beech hedge.

Willum (not to be confused with grandson "William") was not, I am sad to say, blessed with a personality that endeared itself to me. He graduated from captivating kitten - here photographed at his Hampshire birthplace on the day some of us fell for him - to curmudgeonly cat, a dominant presence, but not a particularly loving one, at least until his final transformation to pathetic pussy. Perhaps he found Gloucestershire rather infra dig, as might a cricket enthusiast forced to move to a county captained by Tom Graveney having been used to A.C.D. Ingleby-Mackenzie.

Having said this, Willum is missed.

"A farm for the future"?

Last night, we were at another string quartet recital. Very different from any of our Cheltenham experiences, the Brodsky Quartet's recital took place in the idyllic setting of Guiting Power Village Hall as part of the 39th music festival held there. I remember attending what must have been one of the first, the village's great benefactor Raymond Cochrane making a rather hesitant speech of welcome.

We came expecting to hear a rare programme of Italian music, but preparation time for this had been lost. "I had an accident cutting up the chorizo," violist, Paul Cassidy explained. We could hardly complain at the substitution of Wolf's Italian Serenade and Beethoven Op. 132.

On the narrow road up to Guiting we made way for a huge lorry and trailer loaded with straw bales: my photograph, taken at 9 o'clock during the concert interval, shows - across the cricket ground for which the Village Hall acts as pavilion - a similar vehicle: the harvesting continued even as we drove away from the village an hour later. I wondered what the prognosis was for such hugely carbon-intensive operations, in the light of watching Rebecca Hosking's wonderful BBC2 film, "A farm for the future." You can still catch it in segments on YouTube: start here. Well worth the trouble!

"Never again..."

For today's meeting of the Gloucestershire Churches Environmental Justice Network, we travelled to Wallsworth Hall as guests of Nature in Art. Simon Trapnell, its Director, joined us for part of our discussion.

What a vision! To take on that vast building (set in the middle of nowhere at the end of a long drive) and to establish within it a vibrant collection of works depicting things bright and beautiful, and in particular all creatures great and small!

So as to mark the second anniversary of the dire flooding in this part of Gloucestershire, we read together familiar words from the Book of Genesis about Noah, "a man of integrity among his contemporaries." God's covenant (made after the flood subsided) was: "Never again will I curse the earth because of man... Never again will I strike down every living thing as I have done. As long as earth lasts, sowing and reaping, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall cease no more."

In these days many prophesy the end of humanity as a consequence of human greed. In his latest encyclical, Pope Benedict says that if people destroy their environment, they will also destroy their own life source. No complacency in virtue of Genesis 8!

"... considerably advances global warming"

Last week, I enthused about Christianne Stotijn's recital in the Cheltenham Music Festival. Earlier this year, I now learn, a Times reporter described her as "in a class apart... delivers her songs with a lyrical glow that considerably advances global warming."

I had been reflecting since the Festival on its likely carbon footprint. Has any attempt been made to calculate this I wonder? In particular in terms of the transport of audience members and performers - like Ms. Stotijn, from Holland - to and from Cheltenham. Are international festivals sustainable in terms of climate change and peak oil? On the analagous issue of holidays abroad, I shall be listening to the Moral Maze tonight with some interest. Incidentally, hands up, my photograph was taken in Nicosia!

Festival finale

Although the Cheltenham Music Festival doesn't end till tomorrow night, I've been to my last event now - a performance by the Australian String Quartet this morning: they put across their compatriot, Peter Sculthorpe's Quartet no 8 well - an interesting piece - but overall did not appear quite to be in the medal category from where I was sitting. The competition has however been fierce in Cheltenham, these last 14 days. Perhaps they were a bit handicapped by playing with a guest cellist.

Last night there were a couple of hiccoughs at the end of Christianne Stotijn's recital, with Julius Drake, but overall that was definitely a medal performance: this 31-year-old mezzo certainly deserves to be going places: the opera stage, I'd hope, with a voice so full of drama and power to colour the phrases. "Das Mädchen fing zu weinen an," she sang in Mahler's celebrated Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen - and we could have wept too I guess, at that and also at other moments during the evening. Great stuff, and great too to be reminded of how difficult it is to sustain a recital of this intensity by the young singer's reluctantly-admitted frailty.

So, a big thank you to Meurig Bowen and to all those who have been responsible for providing us with such a musical feast during this year's Festival!

The art of the quartet

Cheltenham Music Festival is certainly celebrating quartets this year: eight ensembles from round the world are playing for us, and superannuated instruments that have no doubt made up string quartets in the past have been painted for a special exhibition - most of it to be seen in the Summerfield Gallery, part of the University of Gloucestershire's Pittville Campus in Albert Road - round the corner from the Pump Room where the musicians perform.

The brainchild of Festival Director Meurig Bowen, the decorated fiddles and cellos make an appropriate accompaniment for the hilarious Hoffnung cartoons, which form the main show in the Gallery. Some surprising artists have taken up the challenge, including our local MP, Martin Horwood. My illustration shows Bob Devereux's violin on the left, Peter Granville-Edmunds's next to it (his illustration compares the wrecked instrument with a bombed out facade in I think Dresden), and then Mila Judge-Furstova's splendidly adorned cello - even painted on the inside.

But Meurig has run into some flak from the The Strad - see his blog. An interesting question, whether or not painted violins are art! They will be auctioned for charity next year - which doesn't necessarily make them art of course. I would never buy one myself, but they are fun to see exhibited, especally alongside many hundreds of painted violin cutouts, on show in the centre of town in various locations - part of another of the Festival's enterprising education projects.

Yesterday Quatuor Diotima gave the UK premiere of Matthias Pintscher's Study IV for Treatise on the Veil, the most curious work I have heard for a long while: not a single note of music as we know it! In the composer's programme note, he writes intriguingly: "I often find myself wishing that I was able to draw directly onto the sound of the instruments like a painter."

Sing East, Sing West

So taken up was I with Elizabeth Watts' excellent recital yesterday morning that I forgot to mention a splendid schools project - part of our Music Festival's education programme - which came to fruition on Monday evening in Cheltenham Town Hall. 250 or so primary school children packed the stage to listen to and give us an hour of music celebrating the Jewish Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions, along with Judeo-Arabic songs and klezmer-influenced American music. A joyous occasion for all, including the parents in the audience, who took their own singing lesson (at the end of the concert) with due seriousness!

And yesterday evening, for something completely different, we listened to the sublime Angela Hewitt, one of those who make strong men weep.

"Sweet little bell"

Elizabeth Watts was the soloist in a delightful lieder recital at the Pittville Pump Room this morning, the first of this year's Cheltenham Festival. Her voice is indeed bell-like, perfectly suited to the "Spring" songs of Schubert which she put together to form a cycle filling the first half of her programme. She reminded me of the young Margaret Price - indeeds she even looks a little bit the same.

After the interval, Elizabeth sang Barber's Hermit Songs and six of Britten's folksongs. It was the Barber that hit the spot for me, the often naive words being brought wittily and poignantly to life by this fine young singer.

Poles together

A splendid innovation at this year's Cheltenham Music Festival concerts at Pittville is an additional central aisle between the seating. With my long legs, I have felt myself lucky to get a place beside it nearly every time. The view, in one of the most beautiful chamber music venues anywhere (not just my opinion), is as good as it gets from where I have been sitting.

One rather disconcerting feature, however, is the way in which the large, central chandelier sways slightly from side to side - a cross between the huge Botafumeiro in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral (I hope to see it one day) and an outsize metronome. The fact that the swaying does not happen in time with the music may or may not put off those on the platform: it certainly didn't seem to do so this morning, when we were treated to what for me was one of the best recitals in this Festival to date.

After hearing American, Russian and Finnish Quartets, today I listened to the Royal Quartet from Poland performing their compatriot, Szymanowski (the second of his two quartets), together with early Mendelssohn and Mozart's sublime Clarinet Quintet. It all seemed just right, particularly the Szymanowski - quite new to me. Emma Johnson stood between the seated strings, playing her part from memory. Having struggled to learn to play the clarinet at school, I have an inkling how hard it is to play so sweetly.

And sweetest of all was their encore, a quintet arrangement of the Mozart Ave verum corpus. A Royal occasion indeed!

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.

Out of order at the Festival

I've been reading Pope Benedict's new "social" encyclical - rather appropriate given that today is the feast of St Benedict. "It is good for people to realise," he writes, "that purchasing is always a moral - and not simply economic - act." Well, I can't claim any very high-minded motive for declining to purchase a £9 Music Festival programme (or even the £1 throw-away sheets) when I've attended this Festival's concerts. I came to realise at a certain stage a few years ago that the house - or rather the attic - was already too full of old concert and theatre programmes, and that I just had to stop buying them. Anyway the Festival provides a perfectly adequate advance booking brochure, setting out what we are to hear.

Perfectly adequate? Yes, for the most part, but this week there have been two irritating occasions when the order of the pieces performed has not been as set out in the advance brochure - and I and those others in the same boat were not given prior notice of this. While most of those of us left in the dark could probably tell after the first couple of bars that it was Beethoven not Shostakovich that the Borodin Quartet were playing in the middle of their recital programme, it was not at all obvious yesterday evening that Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih were launching into Schumann instead of Mendelssohn after their opener. So, a little more consideration please, Meurig "Hedgehog" Bowen, if the order is to be changed in future - particularly as you were up there on the stage, chatting away to us anyway before the concert, with your roving mike.

Having got that off my chest, I will say immediately that there was absolutely nothing out of order about the playing last night. It was a delight to hear two performers so much in sympathy with one another, and with a passionate shared commitment to the work of those two composers. OK, the "new" variations spurieuses - Thomas Ades's description, we were told - by Mendelssohn were perhaps a bit boring; but the second half of the recital took fire in no uncertain terms. This, anyway, seemed to be the post-performance consensus over supper - one of those present being particularly hungry having (aged 75) bicycled 12 or so miles to the concert.

Meta4 (pictured here before their rushed exit to catch their flights home to Helsinki) and the dynamic Ingrid Fliter likewise took fire yesterday morning, in the same hall, playing more Schumann - his great Piano Quintet: why is it so much less celebrated than Schubert's Trout? Perhaps because it doesn't have a nickname.

Before their interval, Meta4 had - with all the fearlessness of youth - launched into Beethoven Op 130, with the Grosse Fuge thrown in. We were in Cornwall last week, and I marvelled at the beauty of the waves, for surfing; but also at how perilous was the undertow. I was reminded of this during parts of that great fuge, where the playing rolls along, but can so easily come adrift: happily the quartet, 3/4 of whom played standing up (on their surfboards), all ended together eventually. A brave performance.

"Remnants of our time"

Cheltenham's caryatids are a familiar and much-loved feature of the Montpellier shopping area. However, we now have - temporarily - a rival collection, albeit undraped, at Pittville. Josie Spencer is exhibiting there a dozen or so lifesize figurative works (not all armless) under the title "Remnants of our time": bronze and clay - green, blue, brown, grey, ochre - and all in different positions.

Visiting the show when there weren't many people about, I found the presences somewhat disconcerting; but then that would seem to be the artist's intention. Anyway, the Pump Room colonnade makes a superb display place for them.

Part of the proceeds of any sales will go to support the Music Festival. I hope to write about a third of this year's stimulating exhibitions another day.

Europa fits the bill

Scott Ellaway is an ambitious young man. Only 26 still, he founded Orchestra Europa all of three years ago: tonight they performed together a matchingly ambitious programme at the Cheltenham Music Festival. Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream overture; Tchaikovsky's violin concerto (Nicola Benedetti as soloist) and Schubert's Great C Major symphony. Not surprisingly, the Town Hall was packed for such popular fare. (The 6 o'clock start time was a further factor making it a gift for the corporate entertainers, who were out in force: solicitors, accountants, surveyors, headmistresses, past High Sherrifs - why, I even saw the Chief Constable there.)

What did we think of the big screens? Personally, I felt they were brilliant; but I seemed to be in a minority in our group - even though we were at the back of the hall, amongst those most likely to take advantage of them. Time will tell. Anything to distract attention from the lugubrious statues of Kings Edward VII and George V has to be an advantage in my book.

And the music? Well, the Mendelssohn was a bit heavy perhaps; and the orchestral accompaniment to the concerto soloist rather too prominent, but Benedetti gave it welly, and looks the part, if one can say such a thing these days. For me, the Schubert was the evening's highlight: OK, perhaps some of the brass might have thought they were playing Janáček rather than Schubert (especially in the 2nd movement), but I put that down to youthful enthusiasm. The tempi were on the whole just right, which is all-important in so long a work - so long indeed that we had to call on the Town Hall's first aider to revive one of our party. A dramatic end to the evening.

The Borodin sound

A legend in its field, the Borodin String Quartet has been playing to a packed Pittville Pump Room this evening. The Quartet's formation during the latter years of World War II coincided with our first Cheltenham Music Festival. The present four are inheritors of a great tradition: you could tell it - even from the back of the hall - from their first appearance. But the playing too was distinctive: a sedate, oddly humourless Haydn ("the Bird"), monumental early Beethoven (Op 18(1): what a first movement that has!), and some memorable Shostakovich - if that's your bag: I'm afraid it's not mine, at least when it comes to Quartet no 3. Perhaps it was the glass of wine I had in the interval.

Coming home towards 10 p.m., after all the rain we had a still-bright sky behind us and steely greyness ahead. The white terraced fronts of All Saints Road took on a spooky look: Alfred Hitchcock would have loved it.

Hoffnung at Pittville

Visiting galleries, I am inclined to be oppressed by the earnestness of the experience: public libraries no longer seem to require silence, so why should visitors to art galleries need to be so reverential?

What was lovely about popping into the Hoffnung exhibition yesterday (on at the University of Gloucestershire's Pittville Campus till 18th) was the chorus of chuckles that rippled round the room. I had always been rather sniffy about Gerard Hoffnung, but this show is a revelation, covering the huge range of his work from its earliest beginnings - his political cartoons flirting with danger, in pre-WW2 Germany.

Such richness of imagination! A treasure store not merely for the music-lover: go!

The 65th Cheltenham Festival of Music

John Manduell - who ran our music festival for many years - used to contact local Air Force bases in advance, to ensure there would be no low-flying planes to provide unwelcome obbligati during concerts. His meticulous successor, Meurig Bowen, was confronted by a different source of extraneous sound during tonight's Smith Quartet recital: a firework display - marking end of term festivities at Cheltenham Ladies' College, one gathers. The College, not content with adding to the warming of the planet and burning money, marred our enjoyment of Philip Glass's concentrated 5th Quartet. (Their display would have been better timed for rather earlier in the evening when Handel's Royal Fireworks music was performed in the same building.)

This apart, the Smith Quartet galvanised the audience with exhilarating renderings of George Crumb's Black Angels and Steve Reich's Different Trains. A pity we couldn't hear them in a better space, though: the Pillar Room's sightlines are appalling; the acoustic lacks resonance and we all sweltered in the heat.

Earlier, I had visited Pittville and glimpsed the Festival's Fiesta in the Park: as you can see from my photograph, a good time was being had by all - or all who turned out: the Park deserved to be packed on a sunny Saturday afternoon, given the effort the organisers had put into the occasion. (I hope to write more about what's on display at Pittville shortly.)

Is it a film? Is it a play?

We have just come in from supper in the garden, having been to the theatre this evening. Or was it the cinema? Confusing, as the venue was The Roses Theatre, Tewkesbury; but what we saw was shown on a cinema screen - albeit a transmission of a live performance from The Royal National Theatre.

Racine's Phèdre is not perhaps the best play with which to have started the NT Live Performance experiment. Tragedies don't come very much more hysterical than this; and the alienation - to me - was palpable. It started with a cringe-making interview by a ham Jeremy Irons of poor, corpsing Nick Hytner on top of the NT building beforehand. The funniest moment of the evening - at least for the audience at The Roses.

At the end of the two-hour melodrama, perhaps a quarter of us clapped: I was embarrassed. Not that the acting in Phèdre itself was half bad: it was indeed more than half good. The set was certainly magisterial. But it's a creaky old play, and to have to sit through those long speeches in what was essentially a cinema made me at least feel pretty restless. The worst part was the lack of complete sound/lips synchronisation: this wouldn't be tolerable in a film, so why should we have had to put up with it last night, I ask.

It was though nostalgic to see Helen Mirren tackle this big speaking part, having seen her 45 years ago as that other Greek nemesis, Helen of Troy when literally a slip of a girl - naked, walking silently across the stage in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus: a defining moment in my theatregoing.

Lean and hungry

Our good economist friend David Fleming, of The Lean Econmomy Connection has been to stay. He arrived late last evening, ate a large supper (and breakfast) and left this morning for an all-day seminar at the University of Gloucestershire on the topic of Universities of Transition.

Always inspiring company, David curiously combines the role of wild prophet - he was an early Hon. Treasurer of the Ecology Party for instance, before pioneering the concept of domestic tradable quotas - with the look and feel of a reactionary: thus he will liven up your dinner party by defending vigorously Tony Blair's decision to take us to war in Iraq alongside George W. Bush.

A second happy day!

An outdoor ceremony in England during June – such as Mini and Leo planned yesterday – means umbrellas at the ready, but our daughter-in-law proved right in saying that she is "Sunny Lady:" there was only the merest whiff of rain during the post-marriage blessing and celebration in the romantic setting of Painswick's Rococo Garden. Andrew Meynell devised a beautiful liturgy: this was his Introduction:

Leo and Katsumi are really thrilled that you are all able to come to this Celebration of their Marriage, and want to welcome you very warmly to the Rococo Gardens. This is the English celebration – the Japanese version will happen in October – so it is based on a Christian service. They are very keen to help us think through the significance of what they have done in marrying each other and to open our understanding of the meaning of this relationship. They particularly want their family and friends to participate with them in this Service before we all move to the Orangery for the reception and cutting of the cake.

You, Mini and Leo, are standing in front of your family and friends as husband and wife, as you come to dedicate your lives to each other.

From very early in the Christian story, Marriage has been understood as a gift: it is a given that husband and wife may comfort and help each other, living together in need and in plenty, in sorrow and joy. It is a given, that with delight and tenderness they may know each other in love, and, through the joy of their bodily union, may strengthen the union of the hearts and lives. It is a given as the foundation of family life in which children may be borne and nurtured in accordance with God's will, to his praise and glory. This is the meaning of the marriage you have made.

Leo and Mini, you are doing more than marrying each other: you belong to one another as partners and as soulmates; and also are bringing together two families from different countries, crossing the boundaries of cultures and faiths. By your action here you are saying you are not afraid of differences, but are enriched by them; not distancing yourselves through fear but committed to working with whatever keeps you from loving one another to completion. We have a common humanity - in which we know deeply that we belong to one another; a world in which we pray and work for humanity’s well-being; where we search for its meaning and purpose; where we repent of what goes wrong, where we act to put things right, where we celebrate what goes well; it’s a world where we become more healed by being prepared to bear more for the sake of others who are less well. It is through close relationships such as marriage that we learn about trust, commitment, faithfulness and love and how we might live most fully the life we are meant to live.

St John wrote ‘God is love, and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.’ So let us keep silence, and become aware of the deeper mystery that is the Holy Spirit here within and amongst us now.

‘Love does not come to an end.’

A rare group

Not often do all the Davises get together, but - with one exception - Saturday last was just such an occasion, for Sarah's 60th birthday lunch. She gave us all a lovely party, with the help of friends who live down her road, who offered their garden for the afternoon. The sun shone, and Edmund made a speech - short and to the point. We saw people - non-family - we hadn't met for ages, and all ate and drank probably rather too much of Sarah's delicious food and wine: a perfect way to celebrate.

The absentee was the most recent Davis, namely Mini, who was looking after her parents, uncle and aunt, over here for a fortnight from Osaka.

Two Cheltenham festivals

This weekend, the high-profile Cheltenham Science Festival draws to a close, and the 2009 Cheltenham Art Festival & Open Studios - a Cinderella in comparison - sparks into life. Yesterday, local MP Martin Horwood (pictured here) nailed his colours to the mast at the Science Festival, in introducing Jonathon Porritt to speak on "The Green Resurgent."

We need a dramatically accelerated change in our lives, Jonathon said in the course of a punchy presentation; that's pretty blindingly bloody obvious. He reported that one of the Nobel prizewinning scientists, who assembled in Britain recently, said 50% of the world's energy needs could come from renewable sources within 10 years if we we were to move onto a war footing: by this, he seemed excited. He also spoke of the Labour Government of the past 12 years as illiberal and authoritarian: this, by contrast, kept him awake at nights. It rather appears that all depends on who the dictator is.

Today, Ann Sohn-Rethel and I opened our joint exhibition of pottery and photography as part of the biennal Cheltenham Art Festival. A respectable number trickled into the house to have a look during the day: one couple were refugees from a rained off bowls match, so perhaps the dismal weather helped. Takings were up on two years ago, when we also combined, but numbers were slightly down.

Cheltenham's new Mayor, Lloyd Surgenor (pictured here with his wife Ann) was able to put in an appearance, amidst a host of other engagements. Sadly it seems that the elegant chain of office was too valuable for him to risk wearing it for a visit to our house. A keen racing fan, he went away having bought a photograph of Kauto Star. The nice bit about being Mayor, he said, was having to do all those things you always wanted to do but could never quite fit in.

Ours is just one of 72 venues, open till 14th June: the Festival website has all the details.