it dawns on me that I am a terrible guest ... not once so far has it dawned on me that the polite thing to do is to BRING DESSERT ... oh the ignorance and thoughtlessness ... memo to self: if we are ever asked again, anywhere, by anyone, BRING A DESSERT!!
after coffee and cherries, Karen shows us her studio, a small shed-like structure at the end of the garden packed with the artists articles of faith ... and an unruly object, the wooden website ...
this is a work of genius ... a subtle, inventive and humoress take on the website, the place without which the internet would be, well, a mess of cables and wifi ... Benedict, artist that he is dives straight in and is soon using the wooden website - complete with its black stuffed mouse, more souris than pointing device ...
however, we cant linger as we must push on ... we have missed Gloucester, but Gavin awaits in Cheltenham ... we say our farewells and once again we are on the road ... we decide that we will head up the M5 leave at junction 10 and loop back into Cheltenham .. so we drive north ... junction 11A comes and goes, junction 11 comes and goes, junction 9 ... JUNCTION 9!!!
what happened to junction 10 ... have we hit a kink in the space-time continuum? has junction 10 entered a higher dimension and will emerge in a parallel universe? did we just blink and miss it?
we come off at junction 9 and join a tedious queue of traffic, take a short cut, end up in a herd of cows and four dogs driving a quad-bike with a man on the back (or was it ... never mind) and 40 minutes later and late we arrive at Gloucestershire University ... which is buzzing with art students and their admiring families and parents ( "ooohh, now that one is very good" .... "did you do this? ... really?" .... "i think you must get this from your grandfather" ... "did you have to take your clothes off darling?")
Gavin's installation is part of his MA and is an amusing mix of sound, video, photographs, posters and bits of reassembled rubbish ... or so I overheard someone saying ... no Gavin, it really is very good ...
photography is big in the University and they have a celebrity che... photographer, Richard Billingham, which is good, because he is good, and is bad, because 95% of the student photographers are taking Richard Billingham photographs ... doooh!
there is only so much art one can take in a day and soon Benedict and I are following Isa, Felix and Mia (Gavin is driving their van on the all-important mission of ordering-a-takeaway) back to their house near Stroud ..
their house sits halfway up the side of a valley and their garden climbs steeply upwards behind the house ... we sit on the topmost terrace beneath the cloudless sky, the evening darkening gently, the stars emerging to fill the sky, bats come hunting over our heads, and the candles lighting the feast Gavin has hunted and gathered for us from the Bath Road Balti as we talk our way into the night ...
I cant quite believe that this is almost it, that this is the last night of our road trip adventure, our trip to St Enodoc with jugs, but alas it is ...
so tonight we celebrate Gavin's show with champagne, we celebrate our trip, we celebrate the hospitality shown to us by so many lovely generous people ...
tomorrow, the road home awaits ...
the intention is to leave Devon, stop at Cheddar to photograph the Cheddar egg-cup I have brought, go on to Bath where we have a lunch date with Karen and Bill, call in at Gloucester Cathedral to see the installation created by Elpida, artist-in-residence, and then meet Gav at the end-of-year-show at the University of Gloucester in Cheltenham .... hmmmm ....
we are late leaving Peter's house and studio ... its very difficult to tear oneself away from such a beautiful creative spot ... but we do ... eventually ...
this means that we have left ourselves 2 hours and 15 minutes to get from 20 miles west of Exeter to Bath ... and as we sit somewhere near Taunton in a constipated convoy of holiday makers heading north it becomes apparent that (one) we will not have time to "do Cheddar" and (two) we will be late for lunch ...
and then the perennial motorway-traffic jam question arises - do we stay on or do we leave at the next junction ... of course the attentive reader will say well it doesnt matter because whatever route you "choose" is already decided - or you might say that if the multiple universe theory is correct, we will take both routes and somewhere in a parallel universe Benedict and John end up taking the photograph of the Cheddar egg-cup in Cheddar and ... but this is going to far - we decide to leave the motorway and head for Bath along the Ablah-de-blah ... and a very pleaseant route it turns out to be, weaving through the Mendips (or are these the Quantocks? or the Bollox?) ... we arrive in Bath only 15 minutes late ...
Karen and Bill live in a small cottage which was once part of the garden and land belonging to a large house on the edge of Bath ... In the Second World War the house was the residence in exile of the Emperor Haile Selassie and his family - after the war he left the house and land to the Council to provide housing for the elderly ... so, on the Emeror's birthday, there are gatherings of respectful Rastafarians, the air thick with ganga and reggae, at the end of K&B's garden ... today it is not the late Emperor's birthday and we are able to park without damaging any dreadlocks ....
Karen cooks a delicious lunch and once Bill discovers I am an archaeologist, conversation turns to the Roman villa under the cottage and then to an archaeologist, one WF Rankin, with whom Bill's father excavated a site just after the war ... or rather, Bill's father was charged with supervising a team of what were little more than navvies ... however a visit by a very young Bill to the excavation with his father and the translocation of collection of Roman potsherds and tile to his bedroom left Bill with a life-long fascination with archaeology ... and inevitably when an actor and an archaeologist talk about archaeology, it isnt long before the blessed Tony Robinson is mentioned ...
it turns out Bill recorded the AN Wilson biography of Betjeman, and I get a fascinating insight into how an actor approaches reading a biography, how he tries to identify the point of view and voice of the biographer ... we both agree that Wilson's portrayal of the "voice" of Penelope was extraordinairily condescending, and that Betjeman must have been exasperating to live with ...
it is now 4pm and we havent seen the wooden web site or Karen's Studio ... and we are not going to make it to Gloucester ....
