Meanwhile, I’ve been in Ireland, filming “Three men in Boat”, admiring Georgian Dublin and equally Georgian, though perhaps less celebrated, Limerick. I inaccurately imagine that the great houses along the terraced streets have the look of Forties London. Some are spruced up, but many have a battered, faded, used quality. The utilitarian, unshowy straightforwardness appeals. Romantically, I like the peeling paint and the remains of painted advertising, of bolted on shops selling horse accoutrements and the battered wooden door surrounds in various unsuitable colours. These are occupied presences, not precious restorations. Much of Limerick still reflects the hard times before the Tiger renaissance came bounding in on the back of the EU. It may have harder times ahead, of course. The ravages are evident. There are blocks of replaced terrace and inserts of scrappy and mean twentieth century infill, but, because they are stunted and modest, they emphasise the grandeur of the eighteenth century scheme.

The television film of Pembrokeshire Farm has played out on BBC 2 Wales and comes to BBC 4.  The BBC is agonized that the restorations are to become holiday lets.   There are rumblings from the Mail on Sunday, who are threatening to expose me as a beneficiary of public funded advertising. Well, we have been scrupulous in not advertising them, and we have taken out all references to what becomes of the buildings after we have finished restoring them. But I can tell you, just between you and me, they will be rented. (Calm down dear, it’s not an advertisement.) The control is as it should be, but I fear this has neutered the message of the series. It has been expensive to conserve the cottages and barns, and even more to do so in an authentic manner. The three small dwellings have cost about a million to restore. We cannot quickly make that money back from letting them, but, on the other hand, rental will bring other benefits. It will put them into the economy of West Pembrokeshire. It will allow others to use them. It will prevent them remaining largely unoccupied second homes. It will show that restoring them is not entirely uneconomic and perhaps encourage others to do the same. It might also show that there is greater interest in staying in the sensitively restored and rather beautiful cottages than in cheaper, cement-rendered, casually furnished and badly restored places. What it won’t do is make me rich or provide me with a gigantic income to reinvest in other cottages. This is one of the reasons why the Landmark Trust seeks charitable donations to help with its work, even though it rents its wonderful buildings at what seems a high rate.

Last week I went to talk in Hampstead Town Hall, on the edge of Belsize Park, the former pleasure garden closed down because of the mud wrestling, as the guest of the Heath and Hampstead Society. Their forerunners saved the Heath from development in the 1860s and they were founded in 1897 which makes them one of the earliest civically responsible societies in the country. We were raising money for the hall itself, a former vestry building and like so many places of public assembly (churches, chapels, theatres, even cinemas and pubs) both part of our cultural history as vaunted expressions of the architectural ambition of their age and victims of our own increasingly anti-social society. People prefer to sit in their own living rooms and watch the telly than use the ones once sumptuously provided for them. At least they did when I was there. In the end fifty or so turned out, so I didn’t help with the funding much. I think a lot of elderly civic society members have never heard of me, or have heard enough quite of me. I didn’t get much of turn out when I lectured for “Save” either. As the man at the Lancashire playgroup charity explained after I had schlepped three hundred miles to speak to his assembled seventeen guests, “you’re not as famous as you think you are.” No, quite. Er… its you who think I might be famous. Personally I know what I am and not advertised as widely as I might have been perhaps. Anyway, sell out shows beckon in Bowness at the Laundry Theatre with an extra date added, so perhaps my time will come.

The hall has been restored before and now needs to be attended to again. Maintenance begins as soon as the last tile is in place, you see. I sometimes do a bit for the maintenance week call –up organized by SPAB. We record stuff in my house and I am ashamed to say I peer guiltily about me, even as I do so. Let he who is without a leaf in his own gutter, so to speak.  (My window cleaners do mine.) It’s the seeds from the plane trees that do the real blockages. The truth is that London plane trees are enormous organisms. When they show signs of sexual excitement it creates a blizzard of botanic efflorescence that coats the entirety of Fitzrovia in doomed reproductive waste.

We have tree surgeons sniffing around some of the statelier ones in the square at the moment and I worry. Apart from the fact that a person surgeon has to do a number of years and a few exams before he can lop things off and a tree surgeon can sometimes be a seductive way of describing a man who bought a chain saw and van, the real experts, and I hasten to say that it is only real experts who can possibly advertise themselves as tree surgeons (and they are equally as qualified as person-surgeons despite my libel) are in a bit of bind. If consulted, asked to squint at a tree in public place, and then taxed on their knowledge - whether to fell or not to fell - they would be pretty silly not to fell. If a branch does come adrift and bean the strolling passer by, they would be liable. “You said to leave well alone!” Better safe than economically sorry must, as a result, become the definition of their advice. I have a beautiful ash floor as a consequence of the wise and considered opinion of one expert I consulted years ago. He recommended that a massive mature tree at the back of my garden come down. There were signs of rot. The rot was minimal but those upper branches might have fallen from the sky at just the moment that a rambler was wending his way to the sea wall. My dining room benefits, but the landscape does not.

Talking of which there is disturbing news that the Government is planning to desecrate the Green Belts of numerous towns, and that the new nuclear power stations are to benefit from the “state of climate change emergency” alterations to the good sense of the planning regulations. In other words their green credentials will overrule any objections. This “emergency” is only with us because of the dithering of successive governments. They failed to plan properly for real energy needs and over decades now have engaged in ruinous tokenism, pretending that wind power would answer our requirements. This has wrecked swathes of our natural beauty in a fruitless bow to a vociferous lobby. Now that they face the truth they have acted far too late and the wind will power little more than a few windbags and need a swingeing planning act to gain their objectives. It beggars belief that they should use “ecological” excuses for their nuclear power stations, given the former “green” position on these “threats to the planet”, but also that they should be joined by the hypocrites of the single issue green parties in their late “conversion” to the lesser of two evils. The truth is that everything has been dominated by short term money saving.

Sorry, I am tilting at windmills again.