Bristol city and other English ports

And off to Bristol, after a weekend in Essex enjoying the aconites, windflowers, forsythia (named after Brucie's ancestor) and birdsong at three o'clock in the morning. Deepest Essex: traffic whizzing past at all hours, raucous pigeons and starlings; Cardiff Bay: profound silence broken only by the hum of the adjacent rod mill. I'll drop in on St Mary Redcliffe, Queen Elizabeth I's favourite church (or so she said when in Bristol) and swan around the waterfront until it's time for my talks. Last week in Plymouth: good weather for strolling on the Hoe, and shopping in Poundland and TKMaxx to replace missing luggage (you can get a perfectly good silk tie for £6.99 if you know where to look) and admiring the facade of the semi-derelict New Palace Theatre, another Frank Matcham masterpiece, but less well looked after than his theatres in Buxton and Cheltenham. An elderly Italian on a sidestreet north of the theatre had embellished his own house's facade with what looked like monumental masonry: great slabs of porphyry-coloured marble and granite, cut into shape and plastered into place. He told me he'd had the idea on turning 70. Why would you want to live in a mausoleum?