I gave several talks about the house in my new breeze-block theatre barn and they were the best attended of all. The barn itself is a symbol of the past struggle that the farm had to make ends meet and it enjoys one time fame as the centre of the Pen Caer early potato market. Amongst all the lost relatives who had come to see what had happened to their distant heritage, the locals who wanted to know what was going on, and those attracted by the whisp of steam from the traction engine, the largest number seemed to be the potato eaters, who had come in memory of the fact that they once bought spuds there from the Price brothers.

It had always been my intention to knock the badly built breeze block cavern down, but having served as a store for my tenants furniture and spare combines and a dry space to restore a showman’s caravan this was the first time I could get the junk out and fill it with people and appreciate the space the adjoining barns provided. Ugly but useful. We sat a hundred and forty odd people for our entertainments. (Not as clever as it sounds, since we had sold tickets for a hundred and fifty.) But now I looked around the place and began to think that it would make a great permanent exhibition space. Perhaps I should have a museum of the potato there.

I reassured my audience that the barn was still standing. But it was built quickly and as a temporary shelter. Somebody asked me why, if the buildings were in need of such repair, I was sticking to the old methods and wasting so much time with them. I pointed out that the stone walls of most of the farm buildings had been built to last and still stood some four hundred years after being made. The building we were sat in was a quick fix. Today it would be quicker. Any agricultural building put up now would have a built in obsolescence, on the understanding that it would pass its usefulness within a few years, as farming methods change. So concrete gave way to tin and tin to steel frame and plastic. But, no doubt, we will come to admire them all as examples of design form following function and romantic fools like me will want to preserve them.

I hadn’t really prepared anything. I just talked and found as my allotted hour came to an end I had managed to spin out the story of the roof for most of it. It is some roof. Hand cut with graded slate and an argument with Dr Greg Stevenson over every inch of it.  The original was a Pembrokeshire grouted roof; one of the finest that the good doctor had ever seen. The conservation architect was keen to save it. The builder did her best. The carpenter thought we were mad. The weight of the cement render that had been slopped over the degraded original slates had caused the roof timbers to collapse. I used to arrive like a United Nations diplomat to broker peace talks and write the cheques. Bit by bit we lost the lot and replaced it with the new roof, hand formed and layered with intense craftsmanship. Greg seemed grudgingly pleased but then suggested that we cover the lot with cement again. I pointed out that the render was a repair, and suggested that we attended to this in say ninety or a hundred years time. Apparently the National Trust had made the same decision, so we were allowed to leave it.

But the point of the television series we made about all this was to show that conservation is a series of decisions and compromises, most of them expensive.

Back from Rome my post arrives in two huge manila envelopes from my agent. Requests for assistance far outnumber those for autographed photographs.  I get a heart rending letter on the state of the Derby Hippodrome. The man who began demolishing it, under the pretext of essential repairs, is being sued by the same council, before which he has placed an application to use the half-desecrated site as a car park. The action group need help against such brutality. There are several churches with real problems; one on an outstandingly beautiful estuary. These places are suffering simply because we don’t gather together as a community as much as we once did. Instead we sit at home watching bland travelogues featuring ex-comedians.  But because of a Rivers programme I have made I am also being asked to save a lake, a canal, a quarry and lead a mass trespass to reclaim our waterways. We must continue to keep everybody in touch with each other and try and show there are votes in this.