We’re on holiday this week. The kind of holiday where you do things close to home, like Weald Country Park. It’s 500 acres of loveliness that I haven’t visited in years, which has long been home to fallow deer.

They used to be there for the express purpose of being shot as the herd was maintained for the sake of hunting. That’s no longer the case, and now they graze happily close to the lakes. They’re quite sociable.

At this time of year the males have a good set of antlers on them, ready for rutting as autumn draws on, and there are a fair few young ones, too, which I’m guessing were born this summer just gone.

It was a cool day of low sun and long shadows that shot through the trees, and with the rest of the world at work we had much of the park to ourselves. I won’t leave it so long before heading back next time.

Stephen Fry is known to have a way with words, so it shouldn’t be surprising that this chunky volume of more than 440 pages covers just one decade in his life. More remarkable than that: not once does it drag. So few years, so many words … all in all, so well paced.

It picks up the story where Moab is My Washpot left off 13 years ago, just as he sets off for Cambridge, ostensibly to get himself an education but, as fate would have it, to meet a raft of familiar names that go on to pepper the rest of the book.

It’s probably fair to say that anyone looking at his record before he set off to college, which included a remarkable episode that saw him thrown in jail, would not have expected him to go too far in life.

How wrong they would have been. Within a couple of years of leaving university he already had more money pouring in than most of us would know what to do with. He had a grand house in Norfolk all of his own, and another of which he owned a share in London. He had a fleet of classic cars to drive.

He had rewritten the script to Me and My Girl, performed as Melchet in Blackadder, and had the first series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie on the horizon. His writing was in high demand from papers and magazines and he knew, even that early on, that he would never be short of money again.

It’s as shamelessly honest an account of his shortcomings as it is a celebration of his triumphs and the tone is that of engaging chatter. Here is an author gossiping through his pages, all in the most natural possible manner. Auto-banter-ography.

Its one and only shortcoming? The fact that it comes to an end 20 years ago. Stephen Fry could no doubt write another two volumes this size of larger covering each of those missing decades. When he might find the time to do so, on the evidence of this volume’s packed itinerary, one can only guess.

Price: £20 (£9.50 from Amazon)
ISBN: 0718154835
Pages: 448
Publisher: Michael Joseph

We went to Norwich on Saturday. Always fun. We set the cat to automatic (well, his feeder, anyway), put two days of food in the chickens’ hopper and headed off to spend the night away from home.

We were there for The Nutcracker (the ballet, not the Christmas utensil) at the Theatre Royal. It turns out the Royal is a very nice little theatre with a small stage and an orchestra pit and rakes of tiered seating that stretches to a dizzying height. We were upstairs but only five rows from the front, so had an unobstructed view without the associated climb.

The Nutcracker is a bit of a Christmas traditional, set around the festive tree. Basically the heroine has seemingly had a little too much to drink and heads to bed to dream some lurid scenes in which the toys below the tree come to life and fight an army of marauding mice.

It was all very well done, and the mouse costumes were a bit of a highlight. Like Don Quixote, though, the story of the first half hung together much better than the second, which was a demonstration of how good the dancers were through a series of disconnected spins and slides, with a bit of story tacked onto the end to cap it off.

All in all, though, very impressive, and a lovely night out with a tasty dinner to kick it off.

We stayed over in Lowestoft and headed to Bart’s place in Benacre in time for Sunday breakfast. Very, very nice place, set in expansive grounds of grazing sheep and leaping deer. The deer, of course, are wild, and we were lucky enough to see a herd of fallow deer running through the field in which we were walking, as well as grazing muntjac deer and countless pheasants.

(Bonus point: I’ve just looked up the collective noun for deer to check on ‘herd’ and it was correct, but so too is leash, parcel and bevy.)

Sheep on the Benacre estate

Water tower on the estate in which a family used to live between the tanks and pipes.

Roads around the estate