Derbyshire again

I feel like we've covered a fair amount of the country today. As I type this blog I'm in a car speeding through the centre of Derby. Derby!

Derby is where Simon Groome and Goldie from Blue Peter were from. The Blue Peter team used to come up to his farm to go sledging. Derby is also where I failed to win a Gillard award for my film about Watford Gap... But I can't hold that against the place.

This morning we drove down to Guildford, where Nathan was doing a gig singing opera in a marquee. I deposited him outside a glorious house in the middle of a rather beautiful wood, and drove off to look for a NHS walk-in clinic. I've had a dry, tickly cough since Brass finished. It doesn't seem to be going away and I'm not at all into the idea of going on a honeymoon which might involve visiting an expensive American doctor.

The walk-in clinic at Guildford hospital, which was advertised on the internet, turned out not to be a walk-in clinic, and I was sent instead to Woking.

It took an hour for me to be seen, but the doctor I met was very good. Very friendly. She's put me on antibiotics and wants me to have an x-ray when I get back if the drugs don't work because she could definitely "hear something" in my left lung. Great.

I returned to the fancy house in the wood, picked Nathan up and drove North, around London, through the Home Counties and up into the midlands to the delightful Derbyshire town of Belper, where Little Michelle's father, Michael, was celebrating his 60th birthday in his brand new garden.

It was a charming event. Lovely company. Beautiful food. A great fire which we all sat around. Michelle sang three operatic arias accompanied by Ben Holder (our Brass MD, who happens to be her partner... They met at our wedding.) Her voice improves every time I hear it.

The views from Michael's garden are stunning; you can see right across the valley to a dark wood, and a hillside criss-crossed with dry-stone walls. It's almost as though you could throw a stone across the valley. The air is so still and hazy up there. I longed to be walking in those fields. There was something rather haunting about them.