Saturday evening was the first of my five Carol Concerts before Christmas…at St Thomas the Martyr Church in Winchelsea. It went well. Our Choirmaster Jean Taverner was pleased with us and the audience went away happy. Winchelsea Singers always make sure that the congregation gets to have a good sing.

With my next concert not until Thursday 14/12 at Frewen School in Northiam I had booked a £26 return ticket with National Express to get me from Victoria Coach Station to Exeter the day after the Winchelsea Concert…returning by 7.30 pm on Wednesday 13/12 for Ryesingers final practice before their Carol Concert at East Guldeford Church on Sunday 17/12.

Time and Space are still wondrous things to me. One moment you are in one place and a few hours later you are somewhere else. My daughter’s trusty little Peugeot 106 collected me in Exeter and drove me the 20 miles to the village of Throwleigh high on the north side of Dartmoor…10-minutes drive from Okehampton.

The journey to Exeter was not without incident as the onboard computer confounded all the efforts of both coach drivers and refused to allow the engine to deliver enough power to take us along at the 55 miles per hour programmed into it. On the motorway it wasn’t so bad as we gained on the downhill what we lost on the uphill. But Exeter is seriously hilly and it was touch and go whether we would make it to the Bus Station. We did…just 20-minutes behind schedule.

The house my daughter and her friend Lou-Anne are renting for two months while the owners are in India boasts a sauna at the bottom of the garden. There was no lake to plunge into…a garden hose had to suffice...but otherwise it was just like the Bastustuga at Rasta on Ekerö…and much the nicer for being a complete surprise.

Instead of pouring with rain at two o’clock in the customary manner, the afternoon stayed dry and bright as the wind whisked the clouds high over the tors. After two-hours beating the bounds of Throwleigh Parish we posted my cards and my daughter’s letters and drove to the nearest grocery store…10-minutes drive away in the oddly-named village of South Zeal.

Throwleigh has a Post Office which sold milk once upon a time. But over the years with the advent of refrigeration, supermarkets and Chelsea Tractors its stock has dwindled to a few cans and chocolate bars. It is a wonder it has not been shut down. But it is hard to see how it will escape the next round of closures with their whiff of Gerrymandering. Nowadays this accompanies every withdrawal of Public Subsidy…local post offices and cottage hospitals…and civil service or quango allocation of jobs and grants. But with post offices the corruption case is weak.

In the twenty-five worst hit constituencies in the country 1122 rural post offices are scheduled for closure…or removal of their Government Funding…not necessarily the same thing. The political breakdown is 608 Liberal Democrats, 338 Conservatives and 176 Labour which is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the party political colour of the English Countryside…Labour being predominantly an urban party.

Nonetheless the case is being made and will stick…irrespective of the facts…because nobody trusts New Labour anymore and can’t wait to kick the rascals out. It used to be possible to start a war and generate patriotic fervour but after the Iraq Debacle this would have the opposite effect. Gordon Brown provides no answer.

So the Labour Party’s only hope of putting up a fight at the next election is to skip a generation and find some Barbara Castle or Shirley Williams lurking in the ranks who is female, five-years younger than David Cameron and comes with a track record of competence.

It took two attempts to get the hang of the wood-burning stove at Little Burrows. I had been more respectful to the stove in the sauna earlier in the day which went first time. So I was overconfident in my approach to the modern contraption in the sitting-room…although in my defence I would confess to being a firelighters man myself.

However long experience has taught me that when a fire doesn’t take first time around it is best to rebuild it from scratch. After removing the ash and laying a base of screwed-up newspapers a good blaze welcomed my daughter’s delicious Leek & Potato Soup and an evening sharing family news updates and watching The Return of Martin Guerre on DVD.

Towards the end of the film Lou-Anne arrived back from a visit to her parents in Tewksbury on the Wiltshire-Gloucestershire border where her father is Lock Keeper. An eventful trip that included rescuing Christmas Presents flooded out by the rising waters…and then leaving them at a garage twenty miles away when her car ground to a halt on the return journey. I remained in Throwleigh long enough to hear the glad tidings that the accelerator pedal was faulty…a cheap and easy thing to repair. It could have been much worse. The things people do all day!