My son was working in the British Museum and showed me round the back areas. In one of the rooms, under an old polythene sheet one of the curators showed me an ancient bronze door. He thinks it might have come from the Temple in Jerusalem and been looted by the Babylonians. It still has the axe mark where it was cut in half. It was strangely moving to look at this. What had it seen?

We went to the Cathedral in Sion in the Valois of Switzerland. The church is up a hill with a small opening into the choir. It has an ancient simple Romanesque air. We were visiting an old lady in a nursing home. She is very old, inside the room it was silent, outside children could be heard playing. The end and the beginning of life, connected by a slender thread. We were travelling through Dijon. In the cathedral there is an ancient medieval statue of Our Lady of Dijon. She is credited with saving the main town from destruction as the Germans withdrew in 1944. She seems worth praying to and I have tried it. It seems to work.

A friend in London was asked me during the day as a device for useful meditation to think on the presence of God. It seems to work.

I sat on a tree trunk in high fell country and tried to settle my mind. Every time I got angry or felt resentment or jealousy. I would say ten Hail Marys. That would be a lot of Hail Marys but the fear of it seems to work a bit.