All my life I have felt those two places (one a long storm beach and the other a wide estuary with sand dunes) to be the part of the earth where I feel most at home, in tune with the landscape of marshland surrounded by mountains to the east and by the sea to the west... and that worn turf being the part on which we walked - in that heaven.

But now I feel almost as at home here on this heath where I've walked several times a week for twelve years and on the streets and parks and art galleries of London that I've known for fifty years and where I am so glad to have lived for thirty.

I sigh contentedly (he writes, as he realises that that is a cliché), hear a church clock strike the quarter hour, and feel happy to be resuming this diary after the effort and distraction of writing and sending daffodil 9 and responding to the three or four replies that it provoked - one defensive and the others appreciative.

Today I received a letter from the librarian of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, the National Library, warmly thanking for the gift of one copy of the three-copy edition of after Giraldus and I am most pleased that at last it is not only written and made into a typographed book but has found a home in a library that would surely have pleased Giraldus.

These are the joys of old age...

...and now to walk back before the mosquitoes become unbearable. I'll drink some alpine water before I move - it's from an extinct volcano.

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