The Gees have had quite an environmentally aware and stimulating weekend.

On Friday night we hied to Sheringham Park, a National Trust property a few miles from us – a fine, early example of a Repton-designed landscape – for a Moth and Bat Evening. We learned about the 1,600 species of moths found in Britain, and met some of them. Even an ex-zoologist such as myself found the variety amazing.

Then, armed with bat-detectors (little gizmos that detect the ultrasonic chirps of bats and rebroadcast them in the audible range) we went into the gathering gloaming to search for bats. My daughter Rachel (aged 7) was given custody of the Bat Counter, and had recorded eighty-three before ten p.m. We saw and detected pipistrelles (common-as-muck, these), noctules (almost as large as pterodactyls) and even barbastelles (quite rare, these, and there was I thinking they were an old erotico-SF movie starring Jane Fonda).

Walking through the gathering night hearing the echoing chirps of bats on the detectors was an eerie experience. I wonder if I can work this into By The Sea.

On Saturday we travelled to Cambridgeshire to see a cousin who, with her Cambridge academic husband, has created the kind of life we’d all love. They have a wonderfully characterful 17th-century farmhouse which they’ve shored up themselves, and have created a garden with a pond and productive veg beds. They are about to get some chickens (we’re ahead there, at least). Inside the house they do all sorts of crafts, baking, bottling and so on, with an Aga in full and constant use. The house is made of three smaller (but still substantial) houses knocked together and has three (or maybe four) staircases winding in all directions, and all kinds of nooks and crannies, crammed with ongoing works, books, bits of machinery, plants and so on. Needless to say the kids loved every minute.

Still inspired my cousin’s volcanic energy by the time we got home, I marked out a new raised veg bed and a place for a greenhouse in the garden for next year, and even started to dig a pond. The test spit revealed over two feet of really great medium loam fading gently into sand. No hard pan, just crumbly structure to die for. I reckon you could grow anything in this stuff – leeks, carrots, spuds, peas, beans, elephants, alpacas, anti-macassars, anything. It doesn’t look very fertile, though, but that’s why God invented compost (see below).

When we moved to Cromer I imagined the urge to cultivate had been left behind with the abandonment of my London allotment. Not so. When I see someone else’s veg bed (like my cousin’s) I start keening like a bereaved nomad. I have a few tubs with peas, onions, tomatoes, herbs and so on – but it’s not enough!

There was, therefore, nothing for it. I rushed into the garden and had a huge erection, then and there, in the form of a new compost heap, made of slats of tanalized wood knocked together to make a box which will eventually hold a cubic metre of brown gold. Normally I’d scrounge a few industrial pallets (the eco-composter’s choice) but I was in a hurry.

We already have a compost heap – one of those green plastic daleks – but it’s no longer sufficient for the family output now that we have a rabbit and chickens regularly cleaned out.

Composting is a subject which causes much head-scratching. Do you turn it? Do you let in air or exclude it? Do you water it or keep it dry? At times of crisis I turn to the C-in-C, The Don, The Top Tomato himself, Dr David Hessayon, who in The Garden Expert says that whatever you do, you should keep it warm to encourage the decomposition bacteria, and keep the rain off. A tarpaulin and a few lengths of old carpet usually do the trick, but the problem with a small garden is that it’s hard to get the volume you need to achieve the core temperatures required to fire up the decomposition process – a good compost heap should be warm to the touch. My most successful compost heaps in my allotment days were at least a cubic metre and covered all round by as much old carpet as I could scrounge. Not very pretty for the ornamental garden, but we’re talking serious gardening here, not piddling about with summer bedding. Oh yes, pee on it. It’s a shame to flush that useful nitrogen down the drain.

Next week the Gees are going camping and today was the first day dry enough to have a test pitch of our new tent. A further massive erection ensued and after an hour an a half I’d put up a Vango Oregon 800 eight-man tent, the humungous enormitude of which was plainly not appreciated in the small picture I viewed when I bought it on eBay. Suffice it to say that when my daughters get married we can use it to hold the wedding reception. Even with Deep Purple at one end I reckon you could easily seat 100. It almost filled the top end of the garden and almost overtopped the chicken coop. When I dismantled it the tent and I came away smelling faintly of chicken poo…

Well, after all that digging, composting, bustin’ broncs, ropin’ steers and similar manly activities, my wife and I settled down to watch the latest DVD sent by Tesco’s video rental club. It was Brokeback Mountain. I reassured my wife that even with this new-found healthy outdoorsy life, I was not likely to run off with another man. “I don’t think you’d have the time,” she replied.

By The Sea has benefited from a week of my ignoring it for the sake of my sanity, and has almost crested 70,000 words, or just over half way through. Now things start hotting up. For those who’ve been following it on LabLit (thanks, both of you), Alex Beach has made a quite startling discovery about Pickled Lily. But does she dare tell her lover and boss, Morrison? And would he believe her if she did?