Winter blooms and summer nostalgia

The daffodils shaking their golden heads in front of Old St Peter, Stockbridge, in Hampshire shouldn't have been doing that on 29 December. It's almost as outlandish as the psychedelic garden of light sprung up in Leicester Square for this weekend only, courtesy of Lumiere in its first London incarnation* (we've loved the Durham takeover featuring many of the same installations, to be pictured in their West End locations in a future post).

I ought briefly to record a more natural winter scene above Stockbridge, where we walked around the Iron Age hill fort of Woolbury Ring with friends Alfredo and Oscar. The beeches which surround it looked splendid showing their shapely bare bones below a sky of scudding clouds.

So obviously the problem has been global weirding in cahoots with the El Nino effect. December was way too mild - not to mention destructively wet, though the south had none of the north's flooding problems this time - and only now have we resorted to overcoats and having the heating on for long. General trends would seem to include the early blooming of camellia 'Debbie' in the back yard, pipping last year's record by several weeks (4 December was the first unfurling this time, pictured on the 6th).

while the scented South African and Madeiran pelargoniums in one of the window boxes are still blooming (though in lieu of two frosty nights I brought them in on Thursday).

Our Christmas Day walk from home to Kensington Gardens to walk adored Teddie before heading back to Lancaster Gate for lunch with him and his family threw up some oddities on the way. Not least a bumble-bee nectar-quaffing at this plant in Bramham Gardens, an Earls Court square which could teach our dismal set-up here a thing or two. I seem to have missed the bee with each shot, but I can assure you it was there.

Strolling up to the park via the very desirable residences of Launceston Place, we found the jasmine out and smelling fragrant already (and this, of course, is not the winter-flowering, yellow variety).

The park made more seasonal sense, with its skeletal trees showing off their handsome structures, and plenty of mud for Ted to wallow in. Here he is having greeted us near the Round Pond, the little darling who's set off such a Sehnsucht in me for a cockapoo resembling to some degree my beloved childhood poodle Zsabo.

But I'm supposed to be on the subject of flora, not fauna. And that will do for the winter spate so far. An excursion to Kew this afternoon involved many more wonders, and frozen ponds, but we can wait for that.

What I can't wait for is to revisit a few so far unmentioned blissful summer scenes of 2015, the more so since most of these involve timely, profuse blooms and the pics have been sitting on my computer waiting selective exposure when they really need to be filed away on my external box. First comparison to segue back into the floral world is between the sea at St Leonards on Christmas Eve (a very successful visit to J's mum taking her to our new favourite spot, the marvellous Kinoteatr Cafe with its restored 1913 cinema and collection of 1950s Russian art) and a summer scene further north. While J collected Wyn from her dementia care home, I strolled along the front towards Hastings.

I could even have joined the solitary bather, it didn't looked that cold. But even in the height of summer it took me two days to find the opportunity to dip in a freezing North Sea on an expectedly delightful return visit to the East Neuk Festival. Here's the lovely Debra Boraston who accompanied me on the first walk along the beach at the bottom of Cambo House's glen.

and J, to whom I was showing Fife coastal delights for the first time, on the same beach close to midnight.

It was too cold to sit and drink wine on a rock, as I'd done with friends Julie and Andy at the same time last year. So we made a leisurely retreat past the seaside alders at the bottom of the valley.

Cambo House's walled garden is Eden, a substantial enough one to live in and one of the largest in Europe. John Luther Adams's hornfest for the festival's closing event could not quite outstrip the beauty of the location itself, and though the communal experience was wonderful, having the garden to one's self on a sunny morning was even more remarkable.

A river (more a rivulet) bisects it

and my favourite zone is a kind of meadow thick with poppies of various types.

Peonies were thriving here several weeks later than down south

and I need to suggest the humming of innumerable bees with a bumble on a thistle.

Plenty more of those on the coastpath from Cambo to Crail.

and poppies galore edging the fields near the sea at Cambo Barn, cleared annually of its potato crates to house top notch concerts in superb acoustics.

Cue another big walled garden, the one at Garsington you get to see if you take a vintage bus from the cricket pavilion. Ed(wi)na Ashton came with me to see Intermezzo and wondered alongside at the white display

and the multitudes of Papaverum orientalis

while Deborah van der Beek joined me for Death in Venice, the more successful of the two shows I saw there in 2015. While we missed the last bus to the walled garden owing to my bigger transport problems, Deborah still managed to enjoy the peonies in the re-creation of Ottoline Morrell's original Garsington jewel at the side of the excellent Wormsley Pavilion.

Not that they could possibly have exceeded her own, snapped while she and husband Andrew were staying at her late mother's home in Corsham while flood-damaged Cantax House, Lacock was being restored. The wisteria around a rather smaller pavilion is a delight too.

A similar complement over at Lacock

where the peonies frame some of Deborah's sculptures

and foreground her topiaried lady.

We went for an excursion to see the gardens of Bradford on Avon on open day, and though none of them quite compared to Cantax, the situations gave wonderful tiered views going up the hill from the river and the Saxon chapel alongside the church.

as well as glimpses of fine Georgian facades behind flower-covered walls

and a walk we took up another hill and out into the country for the last of the gardens. I've not done Bradford justice from three wonder-filled visits; but we'll be back. Meanwhile, deep sigh for the summer past, and hope with only a few months to wait now before the first flush of blooming. In the meantime we live for more cold, bright days like yesterday - when Kew was a miracle of sharpness - and head off to more Lumiere pockets in different parts of town.

*Just read that the lights had to be switched off last night (Saturday) because of overcrowding - victim of its own success, clearly. We intend to go to Kings Cross tonight. UPDATE: when I got to Kings Cross, the queues down the tube were so horrendous I turned back. But I did see the big miracle, the colouring of Westminster Abbey's West Front, and loved the atmosphere of the crowd around the aquarium phone box by Grosvenor Square. All this to be picture-chronicled anon.

If this isn't nice, what is?

Thank Kurt Vonnegut's Uncle Alex for the great writer's most valuable piece of wisdom, which I'm proud to say has been taken up by our nearest and dearest young generation (more anon). That it had a huge impact on America's sharpest and funniest literary polemicist is obvious from the places where he quotes it (or rather, to be precise, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is'), not least often in a series of graduation speeches probably not meant to be anthologised. But it achieves its best definition in the nearest KV got to an autobiography, or rather a little book of wit and wisdom, A Man Without a Country (subtitled A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America, misleadingly since its timespan is far greater. I only wish he'd lived to pen his thoughts about Barack Obama's America - that might have given just a little glimmer of hope).

The context begins with a negative before accentuating the positive.

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, 'You're a man now'. So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a male can't be a man unless he'd gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they seldom noticed when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is'.

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is'.

Just before the great happiness of our Garrick birthday dinner for four of the godchildren - two reaching 21 this year, two 18 - along with their parents, a close friend and my mother (to celebrate her whizzing back to health after hip and heart ops), I picked up a copy of the graduation speech book compiled after Vonnegut's death.

I didn't use anything from it in my own speech, which was mainly to praise the two sets of estranged parents for each and every one passing on so many intimations of their own rich hinterlands, their culture and essential decency, to the fine young four who are now very much their own people. But Evi, Maddie and Alexander have all enjoyed the Vonnegut books I bought them; every teenager/twentysomething should read him. I think Kurt would have been pleased with Evi playing up to - which means half taking the piss out of - the taboid photographer at the Oxford May Ball in this pic which we saw to our surprise in London's free morning rag: at first I didn't think 'Eva Hale' was my very sensible goddaughter. How we all laughed.

Having shared Slaughterhouse Five with Alexander, I was delighted that he's been finding my personal favourite among the ones I've read, Breakfast of Champions, even better - if, of course, not quite as significant for Vonnegut's personal history.

The big payoff came when Alexander and father Christopher came to join me at the East Neuk Festival's all-day Schubertiade. Plans for lunch boxes to be delivered to Crail had failed, and we were more than happy to wait for some of the best fish and chips in Scotland. Which we took back to the house where cicerona Debra Boraston was staying with festival CEO Svend Brown and his partner Roy McEwan. In the garden by the sea, we ate our f&c to the strains of the Belcea Quartet warming up inside for their afternoon recital. And Alexander said exactly what I was thinking, as if on cue: 'if this isn't nice, I don't know what is'. Featured, clockwise, David Kettle, the Waltons, Debra, me, Alexander (Christopher must be taking the photo).

And from the other angle, shot taken with Ken's camera and duly posted by him on social media.

'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is' could also have been applied to the previous evening's post-concert time by the sea, just down the valley from Cambo House where I was lucky to be staying, with Alexander's ma Julie and her partner Andy. The sun was setting at the end of the concert (one of two photos taken with my crappy mobile, as the pocket Olympus had just given up the ghost)

but it still wasn't entirely dark at nearly 11pm.

Another moment of happiness was on the last day, where I took my bathing trunks and borrowed a towel at a lunchtime party hosted by the very charming, easy festival chairman and his wife at Elie. The garden gate has steps beyond it down to this most glorious of beaches - photo taken with Debra's iPhone - and there, once I'd cleared the jellyfish zone, I had a blissful North Sea swim looking over to North Berwick and East Lothian, and up to a flotilla of eider ducks who didn't paddle away.

Despite all the mounting world horrors, these happy times to treasure have been so many, this year so far at least, and they bring me back not only to Vonnegut but also to my own favourite poem, Auden's 'A Summer Night' and this stanza especially, which no doubt I've quoted before:

And, gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her eastern bow,
What violence is done,
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.