I reckon I have written more than 250,000 words here, a bagatelle compared to Chips Channon whose fifty or so volumes of diaries run to more than three million words.
The sermon last Sunday at The Royal Hospital was about baptism. The Chaplain (I prefer padre) recounted that he had been to where John the Baptist baptised Christ in the Jordan.
A childhood friend lived not far away just across the Boyne in Co Meath. His parents had generously and compassionately asked a cousin to come and live with them. She was Miss Chapman, a spinster whose half-brother is TE Lawrence.
At the MP Evans AGM last week a Dutch friend reminded me of an anniversary. The Battle of the Medway took place 350 years ago this week. The Dutch navy broke through a protective barrier (the Gillingham Line, as impregnable as the Maginot Line) and attacked naval ships anchored off Chatham.
When I arrived in Carmarthenshire on Sunday the house was called Llwyn Piod (that’s Welsh for Magpie Grove). Yesterday the council and Royal Mail gave their consent for it to be called Fox Hall so change your Address Book.
Yesterday we visited Pembroke Castle. The site of the castle was first occupied by cave dwellers in the Old Stone Age, some 12,000 years ago. In the late 11th century, Roger de Montgomery, a cousin of William the Conqueror, built a castle here. It was constructed of timber, not stone.
I was at Trim Cathedral for Holy Communion on the Sixth Sunday of Easter and paid attention to the Dean’s sermon. The First Lesson was Acts 17: 22-31 and this provided his opening.
I hung around SE Asia in 1989, based in Singapore. Inspired by one of the funniest travel books I have ever read, Into the Heart of Borneo by Redmond O’Hanlon, I spent a long weekend in Sarawak. It was published only six years previously, in 1983, so not much had changed.