A favourite spot for outdoor swimming looked less than inviting today. Freezing temperatures didn't stop thousands of hardier souls taking to the water on Boxing Day, nor will it deter participants at the UK Cold Water Swimming Championships, at the unheated Tooting Bec Lido on 24 January.

Counter-culture doesn't just mean hippies or punks. A growing community of mildly rebellious people with a healthy disrespect for 'elfensafety' swim in lakes, rivers, tidal pools and 'water-holes'. A raft of sites and forums promote wild swimming, inspired by Roger Deakin's Waterlog, which is a magnificent celebration of bathing all year round in Welsh mountain pools, Cornish holy wells, trout streams and lidos. Deakin died in 2006. There are photographs of his idiosyncratic living arrangements at the house he built at Walnut Tree Farm (including the moat that inspired him to write).

Deakin had a natural gift for the most economical prose. His description of a kingfisher '"streaking by in an afterburn of blue" took me back to a swim below the weir here. As I bobbed in the water midstream, a pair of kingfishers flashed before me, tugging at either end of a twig.

'Sweet water' perfectly describes the sensation of immersion in inland waters. Even outdoor chlorinated pools will give you asthma, salt stings, but fresh water has an earthy softness like nothing else.

The Allotment Act is 100 years old. After being decimated by opportunistic developers and greedy councils, these little Edens are suddenly a hot topic, with a debate in Parliament this summer and a slew of active websites campaigning for them.  In spite of all that few councils are likely to respond to the Act's obligation to provide an allotment garden at the request of "six registered parliamentary electors or ratepayers".

Locally at least, allotments are thriving. Today (and for the first time in her parliamentary career) Theresa May MP opened some sheds. Not your average tumbledown shack where something nasty lurks in the shadows, but listed, oak-beamed and tile-hung allotment sheds, carefully restored by a bunch of energetic volunteers in memory of a lecturer and enthusiastic allotment-holder called David Penny.

Nor were followers of Ms May's footwear disappointed, since she sported not green wellies but fetching knee-high black leather boots.

The county town of Berkshire a mecca for lovers of independently run coffee shops? Surely not. But a newish website has just proved otherwise.

For decades the rulers of what I used to call the People's Republic of Reading devoted themselves to stripping the character out of the place. They gave us the faceless Butts Centre which metamorphosed into the equally inappropriately-named Broad Street Maul. They tore down much-loved red brick Victorian buildings and allowed what was left to be covered in render and cladding. Independent locally-owned shops (with the exception of much-loved Jacksons) were squeezed out. There was no room in the Oracle (the south of England's shiniest new shopping centre) for local businesses, since they could not be relied on to pay the rent.

But apparently there are now three attractive, independently-run coffee shops in Reading. Significantly, Moondogs, and the Workhouse Coffee Company are both on the Oxford Road, well away from the uninspiring concrete and glass of borough council-sponsored 'Reading City'. That it took a website to want me to go back into my local town centre shows just how uninviting it has become.

Tom Hiskey is a 26-year old part-time musician and coffee shop enthusiast. As he travels the UK he is compiling a guide to the UK's best independent coffee shops. Not the faceless, squeezed out of a tube global brands run by Seattle-based corporations or the likes of Whitbread, but real places with their own local character, where the welcome is genuine and the prices are likely to be lower. He emphasises places that source ethically, and says that tea rooms are, well, 'not his cup of tea'.

Cosy Coffee Shops is just what the internet is for.

The water lapping the shore when the light was perfect at about 6pm on Friday.

Maybe it's supposed to break the camera or something, but it seems to work for me. As well as taking these phone pictures I picked a bag of premature blackberries, but they lack sweetness and seem to be full of the heavy rain we've been having lately. What I really wanted to do was swim in the lake, which looked so tempting in the late afternoon sun.

...was this lovely comma butterfly (Polygonia c-album). Unlike many other butterflies, it stayed put when I started to take pictures with my phone, so I had plenty of time to get a reasonably good shot. At first its ragged appearance made me think it was near the end of its brief life (three generations live and die each season) but now I realise the torn edges are a characteristic of the species. Perhaps it was so drunk on the verbena pollen that it did not notice me. It never stopped to fold its wings, so I didn't get to see the characteristic white punctuation mark which gives this attractive butterfly its name.

There's much chortling that around a quarter of London's electorate decided to make 'bumbler' Boris their Mayor on St Boris's Day. But how has the blonde bombshell served his Henley constituents and what will they do without him?

In the Bulgarian Orthodox church at least, the anniversary of the death in 907 of St Boris is remembered. He was notable for his serenity, aside from a lapse in which he blinded his son to stop him turning to paganism. 'Serene' is not the word to describe Boris Johnson MP in Henley-on-Thames. Scarcely an issue of the local paper has been complete without two or even three photos of Boris pressing the local flesh. Opening this or standing against the closing of that, Boris has been there, even during the Mayoral campaign.

He responded twice to our lobbying on local causes. Once a local hotelier 'laid on a crayfish lunch' to woo him to our presentation of the need for a new bridge across the Thames between Reading and Henley. He watched our video of the 45min queue of standing traffic snaking round narrow village lanes, ate the crayfish sandwiches, and pronounced (fresh from his trip to a local marina) that the best answer to the problem of 13,000 vehicle movements a day choking a tiny village was to set up a ferry to carry passengers across the river.

This entertaining tendency to make it up on the hoof (remember his disastrous gaffes in Liverpool and elsewhere) conceals Boris's steely determination. At the post-electoral celebrations his sister commented that Boris has always got what he wanted.

Each time we met him Boris was surrounded by a group of local party faithful. Once or twice I caught them raising their eyebrows - 'Boris will be Boris' was the story. First Hezza represented us (another MP notable for his beazer), then Boris. So who will be next? Perhaps his father Stanley, who confirmed:

"Put it this way, I'm still on the candidates' list. Obviously it would be up to the Henley association as to whether they invite me for interview, but I don't see why I shouldn't put in for it."

He certainly has the requisite distinctive hairstyle.

The the nu-Labour project is on its last legs and Londoners have registered their protest at Gordon Brown's lack of personality. It remains to be seen if (in spite of his goodwill and determination) Boris really will be enough to reduce the death rate of young black men in the capital.

Live in a 400 year-old house and you grow accustomed to the closeness of the past. Reminders of those long gone are many. Ten generations born, living and dying here, each leaving their traces, some obvious, others more subtle. Work the garden and the soil gives up the stuff of others' lives.

The dark loam seems animate, constantly pushing to the surface unexpected bits and pieces: a little wooden whistle, lost in a child's contented game a century or more ago. A mangled lead buckle, its decoration twisted by a bonfire that consumed an unwanted dress. Big old pre-decimal pennies, never again to be spent, one of solid bronze from the time of the Napoleonic War. Broken clay pipes, discarded by other gardeners 200 or more years ago. And the countless potsherds! Many of them red but most blue willow pattern, the fleeing Chinese lovers long since broken apart: this shattered plate fragment from a service given as a wedding present, accidentally dropped or perhaps hurled to the floor in a blazing row.

Weeding the rose bed a couple of years ago, I picked out of the earth a beautifully-lettered Boots cherry tothpaste lid. Since the First World War it had lain safely hidden, deep in the same soil which had now, wonderfully, given it up. It reminded me a happy few weeks in my boyhood spent digging over a midden left by our Victorian predecessors.

The glass and stoneware bottles we recovered shed light on past lives. If the number of syrup of figs bottles is any guide, constipation was a real problem in the 1940s. We found just one of Hiram Codd's fascinating glass ball sealed fizzy pop bottles (the origin of the phrase 'codswallop').

Solid aquamarine torpedo-shaped bottles containing lemonade made to William Hamilton's 1809 Dublin patent. Trapped air bubbles and the the heavy, imperfect blue-green glass makes these old bottles seem intriguing and precious. Beautifully embossed lettering  and transfer-decorated stoneware, proclaiming the names of long-lost local ginger beer manufacturers: Lovibond and the Ive Brothers of Henley-on-Thames, (patent Galtee More closures), the Tunbridge Jones Company of Reading.

The Boots logo must be one of the most enduring on the High Street. Its present-day lettering is almost identical to that we found on late 19th century medicine bottles. Salt-glazed ink pots with a pouring lip, a dark green Bovril jar that makes even that product alluring, and cobalt-blue poison bottles, heavily ribbed to warn the blind of their dangerous contents. I even found a complete Victorian spittoon, perhaps half-inched from a local pub by a boisterous local lad, and then embarrasedly discarded on the rubbish heap.

JS Bach is often cited as the greatest ever composer and the St Matthew Passion as his greatest work. Setting the text of Chapters 24-27 of St Matthew's Gospel, it tells the story of Christ's last days up to the crucifixion. First performed on Good Friday in 1727 in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig where Bach was Kapellmeister, it was not revived until around a century later, when the poet Goethe identified something of 'elemental significance' in the music. Both Mendelssohn and Vaughan Williams championed the Passion, the latter so fiercely that he would leave the platform glaring if anyone dared break his rule of absolutely no applause during or after the performance. This was three hours of music beyond all other music.

Tonight Reading Bach Choir and the City of London Chamber Players performed the work with such intensity that, between their arias, even the soloists seemed lost in its sublimity. Reading Town Hall, with its crisp acoustic and split choir seating, was perfect for the work's two orchestras and choirs. Taplow Boys' Choir sang beautifully from the balcony.

Three hours passed so easily. The St Matthew Passion is powerful musical drama, built around a framework of spare recitative narration by the tenor Evangelist (Christopher Watson). Choir soloists and six professionals took the principal roles and the choruses sing everyman. Picander's libretto bears fervent witness to the Passion story. With such poignant music, recent attempts at staging the work seem entirely superfluous.

The London Chamber Players played period instruments, achieving a highly articulate and refined performance that never overwhelmed the singers. Soprano Esther Levin and Counter-tenor Christopher Warwick sang with beautiful, relaxed simplicity the famously difficult duet with choral interventions 'So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen' - 'moon and light are extinguished by sorrow because my Jesus is captured'. This is followed by the challenging and dramatic chorus 'Sind Blitze, sind Donner', so popular in the 19th century that performances were frequently stopped by audiences demanding a reprise.

Against a single, shockingly dissonant diminished chord, the choir made an electrifying call for Barabbas and not Christ to be saved.  Counter-tenor Warwick again showed his quality in the difficult 'Ach Golgotha'. In a number of arias bass Robert MacDonald was gorgeously partnered by the agile musicianship of Viola da Gambist Charles Medlam.

The St Matthew Passion ends in sublime acceptance of the redemption offered by Christ's sacrifice. Caroline Trevor was mesmerising in No. 60 'Sehet, Jesus hat die Hand' (see Jesus, has his hand stretched out to grasp us). David Stuart sang Jesus with elegance and authority. He was almost transfigured as the dying Christ, in the moments when he lost his musical 'halo' - the glowing strings that accompany him in all other arias.

The choir sing 'When my heart is most full of fear, then snatch me from my fears by the power of your anguish and pain' and soon a final triumphant chorus celebrates Christ's victory 'Your grave... shall be...for the soul a resting place. In utmost bliss my eyes close in slumber there'.

Led by JanJoost van Elburg, Reading Bach Choir is achieving the highest musical standards. The fine English tradition of choral music-making is alive and well in the county town.

It started with a low, distant rumble, somewhere to the north. It was 1am and I was wide awake and I thought I could hear rocks being ground together somewhere far, far away. I was wrong. The sound was not man-made - it came from deep down beneath the earth's surface: it was an ancient and utterly fundamental sound.

Then everything - me, my bed, the whole house - seemed to quiver slightly and it got faster and louder and ornaments were knocking and I knew this was my first experience of an earth tremor. After a few seconds the shaking died away. Then the only sound was the roar of water pouring over the weir and the call of a frightened blackbird, - 'pink, pink, pink', darting away in the darkness.

Apparently around 25 earthquakes are felt in the UK annually. At 5.2 on the Richter scale this was a one-in-30-year event, last matched by a 5.4 in Wales in 1984. It happened 15km beneath the earth's surface. The last time where was major earthquake activity at the epicentre, in Market Rasen in Lincolnshire over 100 miles from here, was in the 12th century. The seismologists say an old geological fault has opened up and may now become more active.

Congoo link

The Thames at night. Dark outlines of tall trees on the bank side. It is a magical summer evening. In the moonlight, the engine of the little boat putt-putts gently, its prow pushing through a layer of eerily beautiful river mist that rests on the water, but does not obscure our view ahead. We are on our way home after a good pub dinner. On the walk back to the boat we passed Shiplake church, where tiny glow-worms shone brightly in the darkness. We met a retired schoolmaster who was conducting a glow-worm census. He described the few weeks when the females "recline as if on a deck-chair" in the long grass, illuminating their tails in the hope of attracting a mate.

For 12 years I've had a share in a wooden boat, chosen in the yard at Peter Freebody's where the consummate salesman told his daughter 'these two nice young men are deciding which of these two lovely boats they are going to buy'. We named him Cuthbert, not after the Lindisfarne saint called the "wonder-worker of England" but because the name jumped out of a list at random. Just 13' long, built by Freebody's in the fifties. An inboard 1.5hp Stuart Turner R3M engine, made in Henley like the thousands ordered by Butlins for their hire boats, with glamorous teak Riva decking and a dark blue hull set off with a line of fine gold.

Cuthbert always turns heads, often in admiration, but sometimes in sympathy, since the Stuart Turner has a reputation for cantankerousness. Before shelling out for a professional re-build we even attempted an engine overhaul ourselves, hand-cutting seals, and cleaning out decades of gunk, referring to the original manual with its alarmingly complex diagrams and wonderfully mysterious line 'a spare jet is always a convenience'. From being a complete novice I have been initiated into the frequently infuriating idiosyncracies of Stuart Turner engines. We have uncovered a world of specialist experts, beavering away in their intriguing workshops: engine restorers, cover cutters, tiller turners and master boat-builders for whom 20 coats of varnish is the norm.

The adventures we've had! Admittedly most because the engine failed, or we set out too late on a trip that took longer than expected, or because we simply forgot to put petrol in. The locks we've worked by hand late at night, the weirs we've drifted perilously close to and the money we've spent! Trips to the regatta, hanging on to the boom in mid-river as fireworks exploded all around us, the water a mass of dazzling reflections. The rudder we somehow lost in a lock. I was bereft. I even contemplated sending down a diver, but someone was found who could make a replacement, even better than the original. Twice vandals loosed Cuthbert from his mooring, scattering cushions (we found them being looked after by a bemused swan) and leaving him drifting. He (or was it she? - I could never decide, as boats are always female) was even in a car accident, after his trailer bearing failed.

A complete professional re-build of the entire engine, extensive work on the hull, much re-painting and re-fettling inside and out. Family picnics and late-night trystings, an epic journey to the tidal Thames, and even a wedding, when the newly married couple travelled to their reception beneath a flower-bedecked bower. A Sun-trained photographer bawled 'over here darling!' as the bride boarded. Toffs on gin-palaces toasted them in champagne and swimming boys spontaneously roared their approval.

At least three relationships bloomed because of trips on Cuthbert. Two friends were introduced to each other and taken out for evening trips on Cuthbert several times before one of them shyly confessed 'we thought we might go out together - only without you, this time, I hope you don't mind!'.

But now, after all the excitement, the traumas and the adventures, we are finally selling.

On our last trip I caught sight of a sudden flash of brilliant blue. I watched as a kingfisher dipped and rose through the air just ahead of us, leading us back to the mooring and to four lives without one very special boat called Cuthbert.

Offers anyone?

On the other side of the river used to live a retired Doctor who made good money as a Crematorium Medical Referee. He gave permission for thousands of cremations until it was his turn to go up in smoke. A friend's father was a worker there, once the electrically operated curtain closed around the coffins. Another friend had a summer job at the Crematorium, cutting the grass on the remembrance lawns. He joked about the corpses rising out of coffins as the furnace lit, and the taste of ash in his mouth as the mower trimmed the grass. The crematorium is a smooth-running production line, twenty minute slots, one entrance for the bereaved, another exit, the next party already lined up outside.

While some make their living out of it, most of us like to avoid thoughts of death. In plague-ravaged 15th century Europe people felt differently. Ars Moriendi (The Art of Dying) was the most popular block-printed book. It gave simple instructions on how to meet death, avoid temptation, and make a triumphal entrance into Paradise.

People often say how quiet it is at night here, since we are less than three miles from Reading town. But the night is far from silent: aircraft into Heathrow, motorbikes along the main road, and late night trains, slicing the air, tearing down into Brunel's great cutting, four years to build and four lives lost.

At around 3.30am these sounds fade. This is the 'dead of the night'. On a windless night, you may just hear the clock on the church tower strike the hour. Most nights there is only the river, falling five feet over the weir. This is white noise, indifferent and unchanging, seemingly endless - the roaring sum of all sound and the sound of nothing.

In the crematorium chapel, there is a different kind of quiet, almost solid silence, stifling. Dark oak, the lectern and pews, and an organ. At my aunt's funeral a friend played Jerusalem for us at the end of the short service. William Blake's words, written in 1804 as a preface to his epic poem 'Milton'. Blake recalls the myth of a young Christ in Glastonbury and looks to a second coming when paradise will be attained. The music by Parry, for a rally of the votes for women campaign in 1918, with orchestral elaboration by Elgar.  The organ played loud and strong, drowning our voices, making our hearts pound, filling the silence, and for a moment, there was hope.

What a pity it would be if the authorities were to strip out the organ and replace it with a juke box for hymns.