FIFTY YEARS ON - SHOOTING AT BISLEY

Artists Rifles Clubhouse at Bisley

In his novel ‘Any Human Heart’  William Boyd has his his protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, reflect on playing golf and getting a hole in one.  One day Logan, a lifelong amateur golfer,  is on a course in Nigeria, playing just for fun with a work colleague when he wallops the ball hard on a par three hole and then watches as the ball runs unerringly into the hole.  As Logan acknowledges, his shot could not have been played better, even by the most accomplished golfer in the world and he concludes that in no other sport could a rank amateur perform, if only on a single occasion, as well as someone who was at the top of their game. Well, there is another sport and that sport is rifle shooting.

    Last Sunday I went to the National Shooting Ground at Bisley for a reunion of some of the members of my school’s old shooting team.  I hadn’t shot a rifle for more than 50 years and so the invitation to have lunch and then a shoot in the afternoon was too good to miss.  I had never been a great shot: I was always too erratic; good on my good days but indifferent at other times.  I had a good day one summer afternoon on Otmoor where I became the Under 16 Oxfordshire full-bore champion and I shot at Bisley for my school on several occasions, though to no great effect.  After school I gave the sport up and since then I haven’t shot a rifle in 50 years.

    So it was with trepidation that I approached the occasion.  First there was the nervousness, exactly like entering a new school, of finding Bisley and then the right clubhouse within the camp and then meeting new and strange faces, but I needn’t have worried.  Ducks to water, even.

     The lunch was at the aptly named Artists Rifles clubhouse - originally deriving from the Artists Rifles regiment which must have been great fun to be in, composed as it was of writers, poets and actors, composers, painters and musicians of every kind.   Yet they were a serious bunch and won 8 Victoria crosses in the First World War.  Noel Coward was a member of the regiment at one point.

    All the clubhouses at Bisley must have been built, I imagine, about 100 years ago and they are redolent of Edwardian England.  Indeed collectively they look like something you might find in India, perhaps, from the days of the Raj.  Inside the Artists Rifles Clubhouse the decoration was as eclectic as you might expect, full of regimental memorabilia and recruiting posters from the first world war.  The service and linen tablecloths also spoke of a bygone age. 

    Sixteen of us turned up and incredibly five of these were people I had shot with at school, so once we had recognised each other it was just like old times.  It is strange how people change.  Appearances change, though the eyes are a constant as are people’s mannerisms, their ways of smiling, moving, walking and their tone of voice.  What was also slightly comforting to me was that they were all deaf or, like me, heading in that direction: a consequence of the lack of hearing protection in our younger days and the regular blast of the .303 service rifle in your ear from a couple of feet away.  Nowadays hearing protection is mandatory: you can see why.

    So after a good lunch and a chance to catch-up, it was on to Bisley’s great Century Range - so called because there used to be 100 targets there.  Now there are 108, colour coded alternately red and yellow.  The assets are being sweated.

    Fifty years ago we used army service rifles - No 4’s from the second world war - and ammunition left over from that conflict.  I remember someone saying that there was enough .303 ammunition to last 50 years.  Well, the 50 years are up and today shooters use mainly modern  0.762 millimetre rounds;  it is more accurate they tell me.  The rifles have changed too.  Gone are the heavy service rifles; the shooting today is with modern target rifles which are lighter.  The targets have changed, too: they are smaller now to match the greater accuracy of the rifles.  Even the bull has been changed and is now divided into an inner and an outer bull - on the same principle as the A* at A Level.  The inner bull (called the ‘V’ bull) is now the equivalent of golf’s hole in one.

    Certain things, however, do not change and induce nostalgia.  The crack of the report that seems to carry its own momentary echo, the dull wetness of the grass of the firing point, the flags that indicate the wind strength and direction, for a bullet is carried by the wind like a bird and you have to allow for this.  Above all the faint scent of burnt cordite drifting in the air.

    Shooting at 500 yards and using a borrowed rifle too long for me in the stock I nevertheless shot a 27 (out of 35) including one of those ‘could not be bettered’ ‘V’ bulls:  a score which would have let down my shooting team in the old days but which nonetheless would not have been unknown.  Incredible, I thought.  50 years on and so little  changed.
   
   

AN APPEALING HOUSE

I am writing this in my favourite place: in bed. On Saturdays I can be quite self- indulgent. ‘I am allowed,’ as the children used to say defiantly when they were growing up.  I like working in bed, it has many advantages and when I turn my head from the laptop I can see out of the bedroom window across the intervening valley to the white gable of a tall house on which the sun is shining.  Behind the house are trees and behind the trees is a sky of grey-blue.  It isn’t far away, this house, we are not talking of a big valley.  The house is no more, I should think than 300 yards away, 400 yards at most and the curious thing is that, although I must have walked past this house many times, I could not go to it and point it out and say ‘This is the house I can see from my bedroom window.’  The ground rises and falls, there are trees that hide and reveal, everything looks so different close to. 
    Houses are funny things: they have personalities of their own.  Last night, walking around the village for exercise and meditation I passed a house called ‘Greenfield’ that cries out to me in sadness whenever I pass it.  And always my reaction is the same.  ‘If my fairy godmother touches me on the shoulder with her sparkly wand, I shall buy you and pour money into you to make you snug and watertight and warm with thick carpets, and John Lewis kitchens and at least two staircases and roaring fires of apple wood logs. Outside there would be soft lawns around the ash trees and where I would take afternoon tea and listen to the tinkling of the brook running close by.  It is that sort of house. An old house, a traditional house, a comforting house, a house that feels home.
    Refurbished the house would be worth a £1 million, maybe more.  As it is - I cannot remember it ever having been lived in for at least twenty years - it might probably be worth half that. I doubt that it’s habitable at present.  What I cannot understand is why it has been left for so long, accumulating dereliction.  Once some years ago an estate agent’s sign went up plastered with the word ‘SOLD.’     A couple of weeks later it was taken down and the dereliction continued.
    Yesterday as I walked past - for the house lies at the bottom of the bluff on which St Quentin’s Castle stands and the Castle, which may once have housed the deposed King Edward II for a night or two, is one of my favourite places to walk to - I again felt the house’s presence calling to me like a stray animal or an orphan child.  Not so much, please take me home - such sentiment would be difficult for something made of a thousand tons of stone - but rather please let me be your home and look after you and keep you warm in winter and cool in summer where you could write to the sound of the tinkling brook, sitting with your back against the trunk of one of the ash trees.  And again I responded, that should my fairy godmother reach out and touch me so that I have fortune galore, then, yes I shall buy you and live in you.
    At this point I was approaching ‘Greenfield’ from its back, down the hill.  I now turned the corner, my unspoken declaration ringing in my ears as it were and suddenly there, in the garden, was an enormous double sign advertising the presence of a construction company.  Well, well, well.  Perhaps refurbishment will start at last.  Maybe the house will become grand again and all I shall have to do is either to win the Lottery on a rollover week or maybe have ‘Boraya’ hit the all time best-seller lists and to be made into a film - a box office hit of whose proceeds I would be awarded five per cent. 
    Or, on a more modest scale, I wondered whether they might be going to turn the house into retirement flats.  I might then even be able afford to buy one and so could write in the house to the sound of the tinkling brook after all even without fairy godmother’s intervention for I shall be needing such a flat sooner or later. 
    But then I wondered: suppose they are just going to demolish the house and instead build three or four modern ‘executive homes,’ stamping on the old house’s mystery and charm and grinding it into the dusk like a cockroach?  Or even maybe remodel the house, destroying its old world charm with some ghastly modern carapace of glass and steel.  I shuddered at the thought.
    So maybe that was the house’s sudden call to me as I walked down the hill: it really was the cry of an orphan child shouting, ‘Save me from the architect and his wrecking ball.’ 

GLOVES

Gloves from the National Trust

I heard a knock on the door and saw outside a dirty yellow van.  Its driver was ringing the bell.  He asked whether I was who he thought I was.  I nodded.  ‘I thought it better to ask beforehand,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to have to carry it all the way back.’
    You might think we live some distance from the road but it’s only a few yards.  True we live on a hill and the slope is therefore moderately steep, something that always used to annoy my Mother-in-law.  ‘I don’t understand why they built a nice house like yours and then had to go and put a hill in front of it,’ she used to say.  I think she saw the hill, on which half the town is built, as just a bit of landscaping.
    In Britain we aren’t very inventive when it comes to hills.  In the Cantal, in France, where there are even more hills than in Wales, they tuck their houses into the hillsides so that if you approach from one side you go into the ground floor and if you come from the other you arrive on the floor above. 
    Enough of a diversion:  satisfied he had found the right address the driver hurried back to his van emerging a minute or two later with a very large box.  I told him to bring it into the house and scrawled something on his electronic box of tricks.  He hurried off and left me in possession of a Sovereign petrol lawnmower, bought as a bargain in Homebase’s late season sale for less than £100.
    Actually it’s the theatre’s mower but as I tend the thespian grass I keep it here.  The old mower could no doubt be repaired.  It’s only about five years old and has worked excellently until now.  But the last time I used it it ran slower and slower until it stopped.  There may be a fuel blockage: it’s the sort of thing that a repairer could no doubt sort out quickly.  If we had a repairer of course: the last one closed when the garden centre made way for Waitrose two years ago.  The old mower also needed a few other things including a new blade and a new handle for the starting cord.  All of which made specialist repair uneconomic.
    So the old mower has to go the way of all flesh, which makes me feel a planet wrecker and part of our irresponsible throw-away society.  We ought to repair machines and clothes but it is cheaper now - and far less time consuming - to buy new.  The mower is in my car and I shall trundle it to execution at the tip after I have written this.
    The metaphor is apt for I have just completed Mikhail Sholokhov’s ‘And Quiet Flows the Don,’ - the classic novel from a Nobel prize winner about the Cossacks before, during and after the First World War.  When it starts the story is reminiscent of Hardy, with wonderful descriptions of life and love out on the steppe.   But everything, including the writing, gets bleaker and more tragic with the outbreak of war and the infection of the Russian revolution and the outbreak of Civil War.  It ends compellingly with a mass execution of Red Guards by the Whites made even more emotional by the fact that these were men who had fought alongside each other against Germany and had lived in the same villages on the Don.  I am still trying to get the scene out of my head.  Sholokhov was applauded for ‘socialist realism,’ but he just reminds me what life in Syria must be like at the moment.
    After that I needed something to cheer me up.   So I wasn’t best pleased to receive a brown  envelope (you’d think technology might have given us a different colour by now) from our friends at the Inland Revenue, asking me why I thought I should be exempt from paying National Insurance Contributions.   They pointed out that though I might have been just a few months short of my 67th birthday when I filled in the form I was still (by a few weeks) 64 at the start of the financial year and therefore I would owe them a significant lump sum, interest and perhaps even a penalty as well.  Oh dear! Another example of the Hostile Forces of the Universe.
    I did have some good news though.  My first earnings from self-publishing have begun and amount to all of £2.91.  I celebrated with a pint of beer costing £3.15 on the grounds that there may be more next month.  As someone said ‘it’s a start’ and it means the sheet is no longer entirely blank.  And this week I finished the text of the second book - comprising my Neolithic research - which I have hurried to complete before my talk in Cambridge next month.   Some time ago I promised myself that I would update my computer as soon as I earned some money from one of my books. That hurdle has now been surmounted by the slimmest of margins, but I think I shall have to wait to see whether the Inland Revenue’s depredations leave any money in the coffers.  Maybe I should have bought shares in Royal Mail after all.
    But to conclude where we came in, as it were, I have just received another delivery, this time from the National Trust.  I have been using their gardening gloves for some time now - not for gardening, but for everything else.  They offer white (not an especially good colour for gardening) cotton-lined hide gloves for only £10.  I have already bought two pairs from them and now I have bought another two and will keep one for best.  They are only available in large but the size fits me well enough and I don’t have big hands. I can recommend them as a bargain.  The winter is set to be a cold one and if ever you need to direct traffic they will prove just the job.

CLIMBING FRAME

Elder Daughter in Front of the Battered Climbing Frame

Rather than install a new kitchen at vast expense we have determined on a tarting up the existing one with new lighting, tiling and worktops.  Ken, the builder, is a little dubious. ‘It’s only a couple of week’s until the Howden’s sale,’ he opined plaintively the other day.   He said the same thing a year ago.  I think he’s on commission and I know he would like me to have a new Howden’s kitchen with fancy cupboards and lighting and oak worktops. 
      A charming young man even came out armed with a catalogue, refused a cup of tea, and carefully measured up.  Later Ken brought us computer images of how our kitchen would look.  It was showroom plus.  The epitome of good taste. How could anyone not fall in love with that? 
     The cost though was prohibitive.  ‘Well you did choose the most expensive options,’ said Ken.  ‘That’s because there were no prices in the catalogue,’ I replied.
     Alas the fancy images were given short shrift and the project postponed for a year and so we have gone instead for a facelift using beech worktops and new lighting from IKEA and some fancy tiling.  It will see us out anyway.  I sense our years in this house are limited.  In three or four we shall have downsized to some shoe box somewhere, stripped of a lifetime’s accumulated possessions.  We shall have to leave our kitchen behind. Ah well!
      Ken has disappeared again now in the way that builders do, though I have to say he did put in a prompt appearance to fix a leaking cistern and to carry out some major surgery on a hedge. This gives me time to learn something about tiling and worktops.  But for the moment I need to turn my attention building a climbing frame.  I was so appalled at the prices charged for climbing frames when the children were small that I designed and built one myself.  It was the shape of a truncated pyramid with a base 2 metres square and it had bars on the side for clambering up.  The children loved it - it became a house, a ship, a car, somewhere to hang wet washing.  It even became an umpire’s chair when we used to play soft tennis on the lawn.  Later its use evolved into somewhere to keep livestock: wrapped in wire netting it became a temporary pen for geese and chickens.  Finally it rotted and went the way of all flesh.  So now I am commanded by Younger Daughter to build another for Theo and Bean, a rectangular one this time, to fit the confines of her small Cardiff garden.  What are Sunday’s for?
    As it happens last Sunday I was travelling back from Le Havre, not somewhere you would wish to go unless you were going somewhere else, if you see what I mean, for it was bombed to bits in the war.  Three thousand French civilians died in the Le Havre bombing, so my friend who lives there tells me, and the then German commander actually pleaded to be allowed to evacuate the town.  It made no difference.   Anyway it was rebuilt in a concrete Stalinist style and won some UNESCO award, though I am not sure for what. In fact, like Slough,  another bombing might be doing it a service.
     John lives in a village outside the town and used to teach English there.  We were at university together in the 1960’s - those halcyon days when the authorities actually paid you for the privilege of giving up your valuable time to be educated. Not that either of us has done a very great deal since, come to that.  Still, there is time yet I tell myself. 
       I have been asked to return next month to Cambridge to give a talk on the amateur research I have been doing for the last thirty years on Neolithic sites in the Vale of Glamorgan and I am hurrying to prepare a booklet summarising this work and to have it printed before then.  I conclude that the Neolithic people must have been able to write and that they measured the circumference of the earth, which is something rather easier to do than you might imagine. You can even do it yourself if you are a good judge of distance, have excellent eyesight and some knowledge of Pythagorean geometry.  Of course you probably won’t be very accurate but that doesn’t matter: it is the principle that counts.  
     What the learned souls - students mostly - who will listen to me will make of this I tremble to think.  I cannot talk from a script - even notes distract me.   The only way I can address an audience and hope to hold their attention is simply to talk and hope I don’t dry up.  Nevertheless, I am scared. I see in my mind’s eye only a field of cold, hard, sceptical academic stares which any amount of smiling and amusing anecdote may fail to melt.  And to talk on buoyantly for fifty minutes when the audience is as receptive as a brick wall is hard, even when you know the material well.  I know,  I have often done it and in the theatre it is far easier to act when you have the audience on your side.
     Ken the builder is sympathetic and I sense knows the feeling.  I want him to repair the soffits and fascias at the top of the house where rot and jackdaws have made a hole.  ‘Are you OK with heights?’ I ask solicitously.  ‘Oh, I’m not worried by heights,’ says Ken.  ‘I don’t have a fear of falling.’ 
    ‘That’s all right then,’ I say.
    ‘No,’ says Ken. ‘It’s just the fear of hitting the ground that terrifies me.’
       

LAST WRITE OF THE PROMS

Of course I blame Nigel Kennedy.

We’d been invited to a friend’s house for supper and a joint watching of the Last Night of the Proms which, apart from the wonderful Joyce DiDonato and Marin Alsop, also starred Nigel Kennedy.  At least he is British, the other two being and sounding - as Simon Schama was to observe - impeccably American.  Pomp and Circumstance internationalised at last.  But I miss the sea shanties.  Perhaps they couldn't be internationalised.

Still, Nigel Kennedy made me think of three very pretty female violinists who play ‘Kalinka’ on YouTube.  Well I guess they play it in lots of other surroundings as well but I always used to listen to them when I was writing my novel  ‘Boraya’ to put me in a suitably Russian mood and when I got home after the Proms I played the video again.

Suddenly I was transported back to Borayaland - to the Casa Malinka dacha:  an eerie feeling - half way between a dream and a memory.  I wandered through the rooms of the dacha, sensing the atmosphere as though in an empty house, being reminded of the events and the people and the conversations that I had placed there.   I had written these but now I felt that I had merely been a fly on the wall and that the events I had imagined had really taken place and I had seen them.  Strange and bewildering this confusion of memory and imagination.

Casa Malinka wasn’t based on any house I had ever seen being a Catalan house on the Gulf of Finland, with an onion dome on the roof; large windows, big heavy doors and a long garden, falling gently away from the house.  It was as though I had lived there once - which I suppose for the nine months I that was writing the novel - I had been.

'Boraya'  still has no takers, however.  The manuscript - or should that now be ‘e-script?’ - lies on a London agent’s slush pile awaiting the end of the month when the sands of hope will run out.  It is looking as though I shall have to publish it myself.  We’ll see.  It was a learning experience, though still a good read and a page turner.  Maybe a little unsubtle, but little in Russian life is subtle.  Some people have read it avidly, others it seems to have left cold.  I suppose as my first (possibly my only, who knows?) novel it has a special place in my heart.

All of which makes me yearn to get on with writing my second one - 'Henric's Mill' - which will be set in France and which spans the life of a refugee from the 1920’s Russian Civil war who escapes from Russia with his sister’s papers - something that leads to all sorts of complications.  The story set first in Paris and then in the Cantal runs through the Second World War and up to the present (more or less) when Felix, the protagonist and now in his late eighties becomes a refugee from French Justice and escapes back to Russia.  Felix's character is slowly forming in my head and beginning to tell me the hoops through which he wants me to jump.

But instead of being able to get on with composing such entertaining nonsense I am hard at work trying to publish all the Neolithic research I have done over the years in order at least to  have a proof copy of a small book when I have to give a talk to a student archeology society in November.  The text is more or less written but it is taking ages to transform it into the typeset and illustrated pdf file required by the publishers.  In this case it is the pictures rather than the characters that seem to have minds of their own.

Yet I did do something this week for the first time (or at least the first time that I can remember, which isn't the same thing) and that was to pick up my neighbour’s six year old from school.  The neighbour had had to go to London and my task was to take her daughter home and give her to the babysitter who would be arriving - or so I was told.

I stood in the rain with huddled groups of other parents awaiting the magic hour at which the school portals would open and the children emerge.  Except they didn’t.  They come out one at a time and these days each has to ‘spot’ a parent or parent substitute before being released.  Luckily Rose knows me quite well, but she was one of the last to come out and the rain was heavy.  I wondered if I had come to the right door.  But eventually there she was and so we were able to run home while she told me a long and involved story she had written that day about a white rabbit called Milly who had a brother and a sister (also white rabbits) and a Mother rabbit, called Lily (or maybe Lilly), who was Ginger.  I didn’t catch half of it and all the rabbits ended up in a tree at one point from which they descended by simply leaping to the ground.

I protested.  "Rabbits don't climb trees," I said unhelpfully.

“That’s the thing about stories,” said Rose a little crossly.  I can make my characters do absolutely anything I want.

Bright confident morning! Clearly the rabbits haven't started yet to argue with their author. 

GOING BLACKBERRYING

It was decided, it being a sunny afternoon, that I would take my little grandson blackberrying.  He even turned off, by himself, the television where the umpteenth episode of Shaun the Sheep that he had watched so far that day had been playing  a moment before.  He loves his Shaun the Sheep does our little Theo.
    Tupperware bowls in hand - a small one for him, a larger one for me - we set out hand in hand towards the lane where the blackberries grow, with Theo pausing here and there to pick some shrivelled offering growing by the roadside and putting it in his mouth. I explained about petrol fumes but I don’t think he was bothered.
    Eventually we came to where the fruit grew more plentifully.  I had taken the precaution of bringing with me some secateurs the better to approach some of the wilder hedges and started to snip, clearing a way for Theo. This was a mistake.  Here was a far better pastime than blackberrying. He demanded the secateurs and began to snip. I had lost one blackberry picker and in return - I turned round to watch his progress - I had gained a snipper of leaves, a little pile of which lay on the ground.  He was not one wit interested in cutting out the bramble shoots that had grown so vigorously across the path.  He just wanted to cut a happy little nest of leaves.  Luckily at that point I found a lovely little crop of fruit at the right height for him to pick. I relieved him of the secateurs and gave him back his bowl.
    But then came a howl - a howl of fright more than anything. I thought he’d found a dead body,  a half-eaten rabbit perhaps, he came rushing back to me gasping for breath.  He struggled to get the words out - “there, there!” he panted, pointing.
    “Where, what?”  I started to go over to where he was pointing.
    “No!” he shrieked.
    “There’s nothing here.”  And there wasn’t.  Not anyway anything that I could see.
    “Spider’s web!” he intoned in terms of dread.
    Now that I looked more closely I could see if I bent down to his height that the sunlight caught a corner of a cobweb.  Theo has a relaxed relationship with arachnids, but for some reason their webs terrify him beyond all reason.
    “It’s nothing,” I said, and avoiding the web as best I could, picked the blackberries.  Theo watched in anxiety as if expecting me at any moment to be turned into a pillar of salt. 
    I went further into the lane hoping that there might be fewer autumnal spiders’ webs but Theo was loathe to follow. I think he thought the vegetation which towered around us might suddenly come alive and imprison us.  Both literally and metaphorically another blackberrying avenue became closed off.
    Reluctantly I retraced my steps, but then found a bush which I could guarantee free both of overhanging vegetation and spiders’ webs.  At last Theo might add to the three meagre specimens in the bottom of his Tupperware.
    He began reaching hesitantly for the fruit, but then dropped the bowl and clasped his hands over his ears.  He came running back to me.
    “Bees, bees!” he shouted and he did a little jig on the spot still with his hands over his ears as though convinced that if you couldn’t actually hear a bee then it wouldn’t sting you.  The poor lad has never been bitten by a bee though  in recent weeks  he has unfortunately been stung by a wasp. Naturally, when I looked I failed to see any bees. 
    Another wail - this time Theo had been stung by a nettle.
    At this rate we were not likely to return home with much of a harvest. So then I hit on a plan.  Theo could give me his bowl and stay six feet away from the brambles and the nettles but from where he could still see to point out the blackberries to me, especially the low lying ones which he could see from his height and I couldn’t see from mine.  This plan worked most excellently.
    “There!” he would say, “there, underneath.  Look!”
    We had the bowls filled in no time and then we went home and baked a crumble with Theo mixing together the flour and the sugar and the butter, picking the mixture up and letting it slip through his fingers.  He even cleaned up the mess on the table afterwards.

MY OLD OFFICE

Blood clinic this afternoon so walked down to the Leisure Centre at half past three. Vast hall and only six beds in operation; didn't appear especially busy. But the greeter on the door consulted a chart liberally marked up with highlighter and said she couldn't fit me in until half past five. 'You see I've sent a lot of people away and told them to come back now.' I walked away and sat in the physic garden for half an hour reading. 

What to do?  Wait and go back, or go home?  Once giving blood seemed to be easy and fun: the staff were helpful, there was almost a party atmosphere in the sesssions in the old Town Hall.  You met your friends.  Now in the vast hall of the Leisure Centre with six beds pressed against one wall and what seemed like an army of staff checking and re-checking lest someone who whose mother had Creuzfeld Jacob’s disease and who had sex (with or without a condom) somewhere in Africa that wasn’t Egypt might be trying to slip through the net.  There's a mighty dead hand over everything.  I suspect it has something to do with the re-organisation of the Health Service but in an attempt to cut cost and do things better they are killing the golden egg laying goose. In this curmudgeonly mood I turned away and went to have a small beer in Aboreal on the way home.  

Aboreal, which is a pleasant cross between an restaurant and a bar is a lovely place, full of distressed and limed woodwork.  There are street tables (the whole front can be opened up on sunny days so there isn’t really an inside and an outside) but also comfortable sofas.  Dining tables also.  It is a place to sit and read or to meet your friends.  The staff are friendly and efficent and whenever I have eaten there it has been a happy experience. It was also once my office.  I had a square little box which I rented which now lies in the middle of Arboreal.  One corner has been cut off to provide access and one wall is now the rear bar, but I can still say, ‘this is where I had my desk’ and ‘here I kept my filing cabinet.’

After supper I wandered out just as the sun was setting to check the greengages on the tree. They are just turning and one or two are already ripe and beset by insects who mine deep cavities in the yellow flesh. Not such a good crop as last year - the spring was cold and wet and the wildlife that might have fertilised the blossom stayed firmly indoors. So I suppose I should be grateful for what fruit there is. Nothing quite beats the taste of a ripe greengage fresh off the tree, the soft feel of the fruit taken either by fingers or tongue is sensual and luxuriant. And next to the tree is a hibiscus whose flowers lend a touch of the exotic with their oriental shade of purple. It goes with the green fruit. Wimbledon colours!

Strange to think that these same sensations, the fruit, the light, the flowers would have been available (more or less) to my neolithic people who might have stood 6,000 years ago on this very spot, pausing perhaps from surveying operations.  Earlier I had begun the job of condensing all my neolithic research into a little self-published book to take with me when I have to give a talk to a university student archeology club in Cambridge in November and I want to have something to take with me.  It is a task that I have long put off and I was glad to have started it.

We tend to think of the Stone Age as above all else uncivilised and primitive. But they are only 240 generations away from us. They were also clever and - so I argue - could write and do mathematics. They measured the earth accurately and based units of linear and area measurement upon the result. We have them still today. The cricket pitch at one chain or four poles is exactly one two millionth of the earth's circumference.  Busy with their monumental stones and demonstrating their mathematics these people unfortunately overlooked the science of metal working and so were wiped out by more aggressive folk in the iron and bronze ages.