HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, ESPECIALLY MICE

A post this morning in the Purple Coo Common Room raised the awkward question of what to do about mice; whether they were really the pests they are made out to be and, if so, how to get rid of them.

I suppose the obvious answer is 'get a cat' which answer comes in much the same vein as that made to Queen Victoria who allegedly was bothered by the quantity of fractious sparrows nesting around the bedroom windows in one of her ivy covered palaces and sought advice from her equerry, or maybe it was the Prime Minister - Disraeli or Gladstone, perhaps. To which the answer came 'Try sparrow-hawks, Ma'am.'

We do not know whether this suggestion amused our late Queen or merely aggravated her. (She was always being aggravated by her Prime Ministers and in particular by Gladstone, who used to talk to her - she complained - as if she were a public meeting, instead of a tiny, intrepid old lady bothered by pestilent and quarrelsome beasties). It is a moot point, I suppose, whether sparrows come above mice in the pecking order of pestilent and quarrelsome beasties, but as the point is of absolutely no relevance either to bird or beast we may as well leave it there.

Now it is of course Christmas-tide. This being 'the weekend before' we are officially embarked on the fortnight of saturnalia. We have detached the painter and pushed the festival boat out into the river where we shall float downstream - definitely downstream - on a high tide of excess and ill-will, the season of goodwill seemingly forgotten in a haze of alcohol.

Which is why it is good, occasionally, to remember another side of Christmas, the magical and mysterious side, when strange happenings are afoot and to this end I would urge you all (if you are bothered by household invaders) to re-read one of the most magical of all Christmas books - The Tailor of Gloucester, which coincidentally and happily for the introduction to this piece (which would otherwise be left hanging without any article body to support it) is also about mice and what happens when you treat them nicely for once.

I am not going to rehearse the story here. You will either know it or if you don't then I suggest you acquire a copy of the book rapidly (Amazon can still deliver in time for Christmas) and read it at least three times before lunch.

For I do believe that everyone can be improved by this wonderfully redemptive tale and by Beatrix Potter's heart-warming illustrations from a century ago.

Personally, I have always been intrigued by the old legend - arising I suppose from the Nativity and the animals in the stable all grumbling furiously about having their sleep disrupted by the doleful cries of a mother giving inconvenient and painful birth - that in the hour before midnight on Christmas Eve, animals can talk to each other in a language that we cannot understand. The bigger animals look sadly at us, shaking their great heads and muttering things like 'after all it's not us that's destroying the earth' and 'God didn't have to send his Son to save us.'

Meanwhile, the little creatures - mice and sparrows - flitting about after the crumbs and too young for sober reflection, whisper cheekily to each other, 'I hope it's a stable relationship!'

Anyway Beatrix Potter's tale turns on this idea that inter-animal communication can be harnessed to achieve a great task - in this case to sew up an elaborate frock-coat and embroidered waistcoat - for the Mayor of Gloucester who is determined to marry on Christmas morning, thereby thoughtfully perhaps saving his future wife the labour of cooking at least one family Christmas lunch.

I have always been intrigued by this outfit - the elaborate tailoring details are described in detail in the book. Certainly it would have been a most excellently fine coat, a wonderful coat which makes me wonder why, when we have every labour saving device to make coats and waistcoats even more elaborate than in those days, we have given up on wearing such wonderful clothes. It all seems a waste of technology.

The Tailor of Gloucester, of course, had to sew by hand, half-blind, cross-legged, dawn to dusk or in the light of a few candles. No 250 stitch machines for him. But after cutting out the coat he falls ill and that's where the mice come in. Or rather out, for these are mice - evidently destined for the Gloucester Christmas Eve mouse ball for they are dressed to the nines, who have been captured and imprisoned under upturned tea-cups by the Tailor's hard-bitten cat, Simpkin. The Tailor finds them, 'this is passing extraordinary,' he says; and sets them free: and they repay him by sewing together the cut-out pieces of the Mayor's coat, so making his fortune.

And that is why I am forever hopeful that a mouse may one day do they same for me. Not perhaps sow up a coat, but leap on my laptop and write from my notes some short story or acute piece of analysis that will win me some grand literary prize.

I have not seen a mouse in the house recently but you never know. I am told they can smell the chocolate decorations on Christmas trees from 30 yards away. We do have mice in the theatre. They bring us luck, I like to think. And remind us that we have to share this planet we live on.

Happy Christmas to all then, human and animal, and especially to mice.

WATCH WHAT YOU BUY

There's a new shopping centre opened in Cardiff. St David's 2. (St David's 1 opened almost 25 years ago and so has eighties written all over it). This one is modern and futuristic; great wide malls and soaring ceilings. Influenced I guess by New York or Milan - somewhere continental anyway where space isn't at a premium.

The shops are correspondingly big - and not all are brash. Some are actually quite elegant. Like those selling jewellery and watches.

Despite this being the time of year when advertisements for expensive watches crowd the Christmas pages of every glossy magazine, I've never really paid them much attention before. Watches that is. But here I was outside some great emporium whose windows were filled with those brands beloved of the advertisers and counterfeiters - Rolex, Omega, Breitling, IWC, Tag Heuer, Patek Phillippe, Tissot, Rotary, Seiko and the rest. (If some of these brands rank themselves too exclusive to be sold in Cardiff emporia, then I apologise in advance. I really can't remember exactly what I saw except a numbing sameness).

But what really disturbed me were the prices! These are always carefully excluded from the full page glossy advertisements of John Travolta beside some racy aerobatic single-seat plane or the one of the proud father and his intimidated and gauche-looking son.

The little price tags in the window spoke of £2,000, £3,000. £4,000, £5,000! Five thousand pounds! For a watch?

You can buy a perfectly adequate watch these days for less than you'd pay for a half-good bottle of wine. Indeed you can buy timepieces in the market for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

Now of course you get what you pay for. And I have no doubt that some of the expensive watches do a great many things with an accuracy hitherto unknown to science. But who really needs a chronometer?

There are of course occasions when people need to time things accurately. But isn't it easier to use a stopwatch? And who, apart perhaps from a round-the-world yachstman actually needs a chronometer when radio is there to give us a time check every hour, on the hour.

My electric £20 watch - gold plated, slim, tan strap - never needs winding and tells me the time to within 2 seconds each year. Who needs more?

So it isn't waterproof down to 60 metres or whatever - but then I have no plans to go scuba diving and even if I had would I really want to dive with a watch costing several thousand pounds?

So why do people buy these chunky, all singing, all dancing, ridiculously over-engineered slabs to put on their wrists? I mean it is not even as though they look attractive. The womens' versions are smaller, lighter, but even they fail to look anything but ugly, even with a coarse (and mightily expensive) facelift of diamond studding.

Where has elegance gone? Why don't Apple Macintosh make watches?

********

I've had a cold most of the week. It started at the weekend and by Tuesday evening I thought I was over the worst of it. I was due to attend a meeting in London on Wednesday; my ticket was bought - it seemed wimpish to cancel. And in fact although the day itself went quite well (apart from a delayed arrival due to a 'fatality on the line') my energy levels held up and without undue coughing and sneezing. Yet I felt infectious and wondered whether I should really have stayed at home? On the other hand, sandwiched on the tube I had at least three people coughing and spluttering over me. Other people spluttered when in a spare hour I looked in at the British Museum. Can one get two colds at once, I wanted to ask myself? And if not why not?

BUT WHY THEN LAPLAND?

Prompted by Rosie's post in the Purple Coo common room, I have wasted most of the morning trying to find out who this St Nicholas was.

It seems that he came from a wealthy family in southern Turkey (from which country, you will note, most European legends seem to arise. Perhaps the Turks manufacture them en masse in the same way as they do those ubiquitous Christmas wreaths, or packets of dried figs, for that matter or even Turkish Delight.

The legend of King Midas comes from Turkey, so too does that of Jason and the Argonauts; even the legend of Europa and the bull - the risqué story of Zeus having his wicked way which provides a warning to young innocent females everywhere to be wary of what they do with daisy chains - comes from Turkey. While, of course, dear old Noah and his gopher wood Ark, (or if you are a Julian Barnes fan) his remaining Ark, ended up in Turkey on Mount Arafat if you're entering a pub quiz.

So it is not surprising that St Nick hails from there, where it is hot and sunny and there are lots of interesting ruins to look at - even more interesting in his day (we are talking of the fourth century AD) because, of course, then they were not ruined but visible in all their ancient glory, Greek inscriptions included.

Well, as I was saying, St Nick (as he then wasn't) came - like the Buddha incidentally - you know it would really be very interesting indeed would be to examine the proportions of the saints that came from well-heeled families and those who had to live on their wits and make their way in the world.

I suppose you could argue that Jesus was one such, he being an apprentice carpenter - at least for a time. But his parents were at least respectable folk, why otherwise the fuss over the virgin birth? and able to afford a room in the inn, even if the inns of Bethlehem were full.

Besides Joseph came from the 'House of David' - something that I have never quite understood - but which the Bible suggests is something of a badge of honour. So not quite your downtrodden serf, then.

And besides again we haven't a clue what Jesus got up to in the twenty years or so between joining the family carpentry business and emerging on the scene as Prophet and Redeemer.

With half an ear on Radio 4 the other day I heard someone say that he could well have come to England - 'did those feet in ancient time' and all that. In fact, people connected with Glastonbury, seem to be putting it about that he almost had a second home here and that the Sermon on the Mount was first devised while wading through the weed beds of the Somerset levels and practiced as the Sermon on the Tor.

Not impossible, of course, but surely a little improbable. Far more likely that He ended up in Turkey, which was a lot nearer and didn't require transport by sea and which (unlike uncivilised Britain) was an already fully conquered part of the Roman Empire. Cives Romanus Sum and all that. A Roman not a Roaming Man - or at least not a Roaming all the way to Glastonbury Man.

I suppose the lesson from this is if you do roam, stay put and don't go back. Turkey seems to have been a tolerant enough sort of a spot in those times (whereas Britain was in an endless crisis - was it ever any different? - of competing kingdoms struggling with unwanted visits from Caesar) But then would we ever have known that'our Redeemer liveth?'

Again I suppose it all depends on whether you believe that blood sacrifice is necessary - but it always bothered me as a child the thought of God (and not just God, but Abraham for good measure, the secular father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, should have been up for sacrificing their only sons). Life is terrifying enough as a child without being pawns in parental schemes to save the world. At least the kids should be given an opt-out.

Anyway, we have drifted far from our friend Santa Claus, he of the wealthy family, who inherited a fortune - probably from the family dried fig or Turkish Delight business - and then gave at least some of it away and at least some of it anonymously, leaving pennies (or denarii) in people's shoes and under their pillows. A kind of petty larceny in reverse, if you ask me. Breaking and entering to leave things behind, your honour!

However, this did make him seem holy, especially as no one else could be found to embrace Christ's injunction about giving to the poor with quite the same enthusiasm. So they made him Bishop of Myra at 'quite a young age.' Though, sadly, we are not told whether he wore purple, or even gaiters.

But then came the Roman Emperor Diocletian who threw all the priests in jail, including Nick who nevertheless kept everyone spirits up and made a point of intervening in executions, sometimes successfully. Being a generous soul (no doubt he secretly put oranges and dried figs in the guards' hosiery in the middle of the night) he was let off with an exile and when Diocletian eventually went to meet his maker, Nicholas went back to being a bishop again and practicising facial hair growth.

He died - quite peacefully - in 343 AD and after a life really only very moderately inconvenienced compared with what other saints (and sinners) had to put up with - was beatified and has been with us ever since. We are all, I suppose in a manner of speaking his elves. A constantly and never ending army of children, parents and grandparents all putting out the dried figs and oranges and Turkish Delight, dressing up in a costume well suited I daresay to an unheated church in winter in the cold Turkish mountains, where it does snow unconscionably.

But why then Lapland? I mean of all places? Why not Arafat? I mean aren't the figs, the oranges, the Turkish Delight, the dried dates, the wreaths for our front doors a clue? If Father Christmas really did hail from Lapland we'd be lucky to get pine cones for Christmas.

OH TO BE ELEGANT AND CLUTTER FREE

As I grow older my life seems to become more cluttered. Not only my life, but my house as well. I live on clutter, am surrounded by clutter. I am perpetually tidying, slashing burning, recycling clutter. But it never does any good. The clutter simply grows as though it has a mind of its own. My clutter has Japanese Knotweed tendencies.

I suppose I could learn to say 'no,' but I'm not very good at turning away from something someone wants me to do. This week as we all met in our little UNESCO Committee for what was a rather important, indeed critical, meeting it emerged there was no-one to take a note. The Chairman's appeal was met by instant concentration upon either the floor or ceiling. So, of course, I volunteer as if I don't already have enough to do but take a detailed record of a three hour meeting.

It was ever thus. 'You do too much,' says my daughter kindly. And it is true and yet I have this feeling of impending doom that should I ever stop some kind of primeval cavern will open beneath my feet and I will no longer have a connection to the world.
That I will be unable to get out of bed, my teeth and hair will fall out and I will have to spend an entire morning opening a can of baked beans.

At least you can get rid of possessions, though these days the quantity of essential gadgets of one sort or another that one requires is enormous. And the more one does, I suppose, the more one is cluttered up with the detritus that comes with whatever role one happens to be playing.

Quite literally! I have boots, a fur coat, play scripts, envelopes of money, tickets, flyers (which I will be handing out in a few minutes under the Town Clock to advertise our next production) boxes of Treasurer's files, folders with receipts, other folders with statements, photographs - all cluttering me up - and that is from just from drama - one small part of my little life.

But by far the largest physical intrusion is the baby gear that comes with being a grandparent. When my children were little, we had one (small and collapsible) pram of which the body doubled as a carry cot. We had a tartan travelling cot - which served whether we travelled or not - one Maclaren single seat buggy. One child always had to walk or be carried. A few treasured soft toys. And that, so far as I remember, was that. My children were not noticeably deprived. One even took a first class degree.

Then we had two children, who lived with us. Now we have one grandchild who has spent no more than a three or four nights under our roof in the best part of the year.

And yet we have acquired (not purchased for these things seem simply to arrive by some mysterious and random process, like spiders): one stately home type pram, one high tech buggy, a high chair, a layette, another smaller pram, various blankets and babyclothes, a massive car seat that looks as though it is made for a baby elephant and an ottoman full of squeaky toys with mirrors and dangly bits, psychologist-designed games and other baby paraphrenalia.

Most of this is stored in our dining room - an otherwise elegant room - which has long since fallen from its dignified state since we needed a room in which to undertake the printing operations that are part of the business we run. The sideboard is pressed into service as a workbench, the table as a giant desk.

Behind wicker screens, tower stacks of label stocks all watched over by some interesting pictures, books (our walls seem to be plastered with book cases) and a stuffed grouse in a glass case acquired in some long forgotten antique shop and which I couldn't resist because the bird is the spitting image of the grouse on the famous bottle and I half expect to see him doing that little strutting walk at any moment.

Still whenever we have a party - as we did last Saturday when J had a birthday - all this - well not the grouse or the books - has to be moved and stowed into the main office and stockroom. It has to be stored in order and in layers until the space is filled from floor to ceiling. It may be good exercise, shuttling 10 kilogram rolls of labels and elephant sized car seats from one end of the house to the other, but it is exhausting.

And a bore! But it keeps us fit and in no time at all the dining room, complete with its Persian carpet (which came from my mother's Kensington flat 50 years ago and which has been trodden upon everyday often by many feet in heavy shoes and still shows not the slightest sign of wear, fading or staining despite being heavily peed on by the dogs, in the days when we had dogs, and therefore must rank as one of the more ecologically sound products of this or any other age) is back to its former elegant state.

But why, oh why do we need to be surrounded by such a draining whirlwind of possessions? Such myriad complexity? If I could get rid of everything in my house that wasn't designed at least fifty years ago I am not sure I wouldn't be happier and more elegant to boot, rather like the woman in the photograph.

But what about my darling little white Mac computer? That itself looks so elegant and functional, small enough to be tucked into a handbag, light enough to be carted wherever. On which I can watch all those television programmes that I missed when I was otherwise engaged in the clutter of my life? And speak to the wide, wide world? Ah well!

But then there has to be an exception to every rule. Doesn't there?

LET US BE GRATEFUL FOR SMALL MERCIES

A friend of mine has just had a knee replaced. She's only been out of hospital a few days and I called around to see her on Friday. Despite all the pain she remains smiling and optimistic, sitting on the sofa with an unusual piece of equipment under her operated-upon leg.

This is a surfboard and placing the bad leg upon it she rocks it back and forth, easing the joint.

She calls it her 'bad' leg because it is worse than the other. Though that knee too needs replacing and is very painful. She has been on painkillers for her knees for some time, though she is only in her mid-fifties.

I ask why she didn't have both knees done at the same time and she answers that the pain would have been too much. Which immediately made me ask 'Really?' Would it?

If you cut your finger, it hurts. But if you cut two fingers at the same time the quantum of pain isn't doubled. It is as if you get 'cut finger pain' regardless of how many fingers you cut. It just comes in different places.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore illustrated this once in a satirical sketch on acupuncture. Peter Cook imagines Dudley Moore as a man with a pain in his elbow. 'So they stick a needle in your leg,' says Peter. 'And then you forget about the pain in your elbow and worry about the pain in your leg. And then they stick another needle in your bum to take away the pain in the leg......'

I can't obviously speak from experience but I can't imagine there being very much extra pain from two simultaneous knee operations and, were it me, the thought of having to go through the pain and immobility a second time would be insupportable.

My cousin in Alberta, who was 75 at the time, had both his knees replaced at once and was riding a horse again in two weeks. But then he was a tough old frontiersman - or liked to think himself so - and a doctor to boot.

Still, in pain or not, this friend of mine is very good at drawing you out and so I found myself, before I realised it, moaning to her, quite shamefully, about some little irritation that the day had brought.

Most of my irritations resolve themselves into a vague feeling of not having achieved as much as I feel I ought to have achieved. I know this is nonsense and I equally know that it is a deep-rooted seed planted by my parents who were never satisfied with anything I did. It is a corrosive leit-motif to my life, but I fall for it every time Mr Black Dog comes calling. Even when I am with someone sitting smiling and joking who has just had a knee replaced.

When I got home I opened the newspaper to see the smiling face of Sue Townsend, the author of the best-selling Adrian Mole diaries - who is, as it turns out, exactly the same age as me.

She is now registered blind, having lost most of her sight. Her health has deteriorated in other ways too and she is now looking for a kidney transplant.

Of course I should have loved to receive the recognition that comes from penning an oeuvre as successful as Adrian Mole (though had I done so Mr Black Dog would have just told me that this wasn't a serious enough book to count).

I imagine Sue Townsend's success is not in any way correlated with her health. But if I had too choose between her life and mine I am quite sure that health would trump success every time.

Which is yet another illustration of why we should be grateful for small mercies and think positively. Success and failure, as Kipling wrote, are mere impostors.

LEARNING LINES

Somebody said to me the other day about how clever I must be to remember all those lines - what an incredible memory and so on. It’s true I have been in many plays and have memorised some big parts but I have never seen it as something that takes ‘cleverness.’

In fact in my experience actors seem to learn lines at much the same rate regardless of whether they are ‘clever’ (whatever that may mean exactly) or dull. Or, for that matter, what method they use for learning lines. I can only detect two broad trends - but would be most interested to know if my observations chime with those of others - one to do with age and one to do with accuracy.

Young people do seem to learn their lines faster than older people - or maybe they just find it easier to remember them for one can learn a line quite quickly - the real question is that once learned, how long will it be remembered? On the other hand older people have more experience, more memory ‘tricks’ at their disposal. So the actual difference in practice seems to me to be hardly noticeable.

The accuracy question - that is whether you remember a line exactly, down to the last jot and comma, or whether you learn what the line means and therefore find yourself inverting phrases or using synonyms - throws up more differences. Some people can learn lines and deliver them at first rehearsal with pin sharp accuracy. That is something that I personally find very hard to do. I start with something that approximates to the lines - it is all my memory will allow - and then these gradually becoming more accurate and more focused as first night approaches.

You might expect these two effects to be related to the method of learning lines. Some people record the play and then listen to the lines over and over. They then re-record it leaving spaces for themselves to deliver their lines. Indeed this is probably the commonest way of line-learning.

I have done this but in general I prefer simply to go through the text repeating a line over and over until it is remembered and then going through chunks of the play in my head, or while moving a card over the page so that the line I have to deliver is covered up.

For some reason I find walking helps while doing this - a long country walk - is fine to practise the lines out loud though it is not without the occasional embarrassment when someone creeps up on you unseen.

Speaking the lines also helps you to get an idea of how to play the character. I remember Peter O’Toole being interviewed once and being asked the question “What do you do to prepare for the character, apart from learning your lines?” Peter O’Toole rather implied that there wasn’t anything apart from learning the lines; that once the lines were learned well the character would be there. From my experience I would go along with that.

But I cannot detect that the recording method necessarily leads to more accurate learning. Not trying to mimic a recording does however leave you freer to explore how to deliver each speech.

Whatever way you choose, learning a big part is a lot of work, bashing away at the script day after day, even when you ‘know’ the lines, for you can be sure that lines you thought you knew will vanish under the pressure of a performance unless you know them so well that you could say them in your sleep.


Then it no longer seems on stage that you are speaking lines at all - you just slip into character and say things and respond to what others say, quite naturally, without thinking. The character suddenly becomes alive - you are not acting, rather you are being, and the situation on stage determines what you say and how you say it.

That’s when you experience the thrill of the stage, drifting out of your own personality and into someone else’s. Although in real life the play is a play and the action is fiction, on stage the words and actions are real, the only possible actions there can be.

How one remembers lines in a physical sense I haven’t a clue - which part of the brain, which traces. I suppose something somewhere must physically alter, some synapses must become weaker, others stronger. Yet there is redundancy too for sometimes even a well-known line can be forgotten completely, as if there has been a break in the track. But a moment’s pause and you can ‘think your way around’ the broken link establish a new pathway.

Anyway, none of this is ‘clever.’ Anyone, I maintain, can learn lines if they are prepared to work at it.

THE INTREPID EXPLORER LIVES AGAIN

I was always a bit of a tearaway as a child - an adventurer, an explorer. One of my first and favourite books was RM Ballantine’s ‘The Dog Crusoe’ - one of those three men and a dog stories that tells the tale of exploring on horseback the passage from the head waters of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, in the days of the deep frontier. The star was the dog, of course, a great Newfoundland called Crusoe - ever faithful, sage beyond wisdom and trained to accomplish astonishing feats of great persistence and daring.

I was lucky in my tearaway fortunes: when I was still only seven years old we moved to a large ramshackle old house with seven acres of land deep in the Berkshire countryside. This was hardly the badlands of Montana, nor was the homely Thames like the head waters of the Mississippi; and nor did our untrained mongrel, Twiddles, remotely resemble the heroic canine Crusoe.

But, nevertheless, who cared? There was still exploring to be done. Trees to climb, houses to build from sticks and corrugated iron, the river in which to swim and fish, cellars and attics in which to hide or treasure hunt the discarded bric à brac of previous owners. There were even ponies in the great field - not ours - but still rideable if you didn’t, like the Red Indians in Ballantine’s book, worry too much about saddles and bridles. You learned fast to grip with your knees or be bucked off into a hideous clumps of painful nettles.

Such a spirit of adventure, of being an intrepid explorer, never really dies. It merely ages, smothered in a thousand practical worries about getting clothes dirty, twisting ankles and other wholly practical concerns about ‘safety.’ Even today when I see a horse in a field I long to lose half a century of age and to go quietly up to it, speak softly while stroking its neck and then, quick as a flash, to leap upon its back and, clinging for my life, go galloping headlong with the wind in my ears. Can ever such fun be had amongst computer games I wonder?

Of course, I doubt today that I could leap easily even upon a donkey, never mind a horse - but still, as I say, the exploring spirit never completely dies and thus it came about that I was idly listening to Rosie one day after lunch during our recent visit to her son’s Auvergne Mill. We were talking about walks, I think, when I heard her say ‘I want a Nature Trail.’

The tea was being made - a few minutes then to go outside in the sun. ‘Nature Trail?’ I found myself wandering up the unmetalled back road that leads up one side of the valley. Rosie’s remark had set me thinking.

Nature Trails should be circular, but the trouble with this is that the river Celé at this point forms a horse shoe, cutting through the high plateau, with the Mill at the end of it. This means that in order to do a circuit of the Mill you not only have to cross the river twice and the leat once but also climb up and climb down again the high valley sides.

I wondered. I had already crossed the river once, by the Mill’s own bridge. Now if I just climbed the first ridge.......? I looked above me. At this point the ridge is a jumbled landslip of grey rocks - big and square - almost as though a giant’s baby had overturned his tray of building bricks. It was covered with heather and moss, but didn’t look too difficult. Seizing an oak sapling I hauled myself up, block by block.

Once at the top I could see over into Cocotte’s field - named after the fat, sad and greedy pony who belongs to the neighbouring farm and who grazes the field occasionally. Having climbed up the ridge I had now to descend. I decided I would not go back the way I came. Onwards and downwards then, towards Cocotte’s field. The ground looked quite smooth, though steep. Fortunately plenty of saplings meant I keep my footing.

At the bottom ran a low retaining wall - about six feet in height. I would have to jump this. What was the ground like underneath? Uneven certainly and with stones. I leapt, hedging my bets, planning to land with one foot on a flat stone, and one on the ground. All well.

Now it was simple to cross the field to the river where I knew that a young oak had been washed down in last winter’s floods and was lying lodged in the tree roots on either side of the bank. The river is not very wide at this point: twelve or fifteen feet perhaps and the tree trunk was maybe six foot above the water. No matter there was little water in the river. If I slipped I should have a nasty fall.

I hesitated. Then I remembered one of the Hornblower stories in which he leads a party of men along a ship’s yard to invade the rigging of an enemy ship. This trunk lying across the stream must be about the thickness of a ship’s yard I thought. Yes, I can do it. In no time I was safely across.

So now I was into the Leat field - through which is dug the leat that carries water from the sluices at the weir to the millpond, running in a trench four metres above the river. No problem to cross this as there’s a concrete bridge so that tractors may pass from one field to the other.

From the weir I had what I thought would be a difficult climb - straight up through a grove of holly trees to the crag that marks the boundary of the Mill’s land on the main drive that leads down to the Mill from the village above. Though steep it was easy enough with plenty of handholds and footholds.

I was reliving my childhood, the pulse racing, grizzly bears about to emerge from the sweet chestnuts that line the roadway. Where was my racoon hat? My deerskin jacket? Had I had enough. I’d gone about three quarters of the way and from the roadway I could simply have walked down the drive to the Mill to collect my ever cooling tea. But I would not have completed the circle.

From a little below the crag, on the other side of the roadway, there leads a forest trail cut to bring timber out of the dense woodland. It climbs sharply up the hillside to meet a confluence of such trails directly above the Mill. That’s where I headed. Here is to be found also the well that provides the Mill with its water, a plastic hose snaking down the mountain.

The trails haven’t been used for a long time. The forest is overgrown and fallen trees make vehicle access, even with a tractor, impossible. To someone on two legs, however, fallen trees present no problem.

Then, high on the hill I heard a tinkling sound. Like something from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ - He jangled and jangled and jangled his bell. Someone was ringing for me with the old hand bell kept to summon folk in from the fields just as in my growing-up days, my parents would jangle to summon me from the bowels of a hidden cellar or outhouse attic.

I shouted in reply, but the forest simply absorbed my sound. And still the bell rang. Maybe an emergency! No question then of searching out a convenient and happy way to descend the long steep and bramble-thicketed hillside to the walnut trees on the Mill’s lawn that I could see far beneath me. Straight down then.

At least it was impossible to fall for the brambles gripped me like thorned string. I tore and tumbled my way downwards, eventually running out on to the lawn out of breath and adrenalin pumping a few minutes later.

‘What’s the problem?’ I shouted.

‘Your tea’s cold,’ answered Rosie.

But at least I had completed the circuit.

The photograph shows the river Celé in spate; there was rather less water in it when I crossed it via the log bridge just downstream from here.