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I often set off on my daily walk, not knowing which way I'm going.

I go where my wellies take me.

I could decide to go across the field behind our cottage, down through the wood, into the marsh

field to the river, the river Torridge, where Taka the Otter lived.

His descendants still live there, but I despair of seeing one again.

Duck will fly off an egret maybe or cormorant, a kingfisher if I'm lucky, but it's been raining streams and it'll be muddy.

I decide to walk up to the village and I can see the old

familiar faces as I go. I walk like Beethoven, hands behind my back leaning forward into the wind and

rain. Symphonies I don't do, sadly. I'm deep into a story of the life of a drover's dog called

Cobweb, returning home to Wales after driving the cattle to market in London.

And I'm hoping the walk will help me in my time travelling, help me think like Cobbub, see the world through his eyes.

I'm walking down the deep lanes of Devon. There's a rainbow over Nethercote. I can hear the children playing outside, 35 of them from Walsall.

Many coming to the countryside for the first time. Their laughter lifts me. I'm not thinking of

cobweb anymore. Instead, it's the old familiar faces that come to me, the people who have worked there

with us at Nethercote, looking after the children over the last 50 years or so,

Joan, Margaret, Gladys, Rosemary, Les, all the old familiar faces.

At Nethercock Cross, I turn left and walk on down to the bridge over the brook.

It's where Claire, my wife, played Pustics when she was seven, when she first came to stay in the village, at the Duke of York with Peggy and Sean Rafferty, where she first fell in love with this place, the countryside and its people, which is why we came to live here and make it our home, why, as a teacher, she set up farms for city children all those years ago.

Up the hill into the village of Idisly, a 15th century perpendicular church, a group of thatched cottages,

another rainbow. I look in vain for a blue sky or sun, a rainbow will have to do. I like to go

through the churchyard. It's not modelling at all to me.

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