Homecoming

I think, even without the Meteorological Office and the BBC, the old Welsh sheperds will have looked around them today and sensed what is on the way. As our route snaked between the mountains, the clouds on their tops boiled and swirled, hanging from them like black candy-floss on a flimsy stick, looking as if it should fall off. In the valleys, the air was heavy with moisture - never visible enough to call it mist, but never clear enough to see the hillside in full focus. 

A catharsis is due; we are very glad to be at this end of the journey. The brewery lights are always a cheerful welcome, but it's not often every single window is illuminated - it feels like an especially warm welcome home. In practical terms, it probably means they are at full bore, brewing the 'Twelve Days' and the 'Greedy Goose' for mid-winter carousal

Comfortable by a warm fire, we watched the whole of the TV Henry V. It is brilliantly done; Tom Hiddleston was born to play the part: stirring; charming; moving; inspiring, the very model of the perfect monarch. It is impossible not to respond to the emotion and masterful rhetoric. But the echoes, oh, the echoes: the threats of brutality, rape and pillage at Harfleur to force a surrender; the glorying in the numbers of enemy slain at Agincourt; the summary execution of prisoners of war. What do I expect? It's propaganda, written during the time of a later war, to glorify England, demonise the enemy and please the crown. It's how we are, then and now