Covent Garden lies in the heart of London theatreland, and continues to be a supreme shopaholic heaven and foody delight, as a recent visit proved.

The place hasn’t changed much since its fruit and vegetable market days. My first time there was to visit a small English publisher, whose offices lay at the top of long, creaking flights of winding steps, lurking at the back of towering piles of stacked wooden crates belonging to Dan Woolley, fruit merchant. It was a delightfully Dickensian introduction to Covent Garden, just before the market traders moved away from the area, leaving room for today’s effervescent mixture of shops, cafes and bars to get going in earnest.

I fell in love with Covent Garden and for several years had offices opposite the ultra-smart Garrick Club, though have to add that the sight of the odd well-known media personality stumbling down the entrance steps after a long, alcoholic lunch was a not uncommon sight!

Today in Covent Garden, you’re still likely to bump into famous faces, or, as I found this time round, street performers continuing a tradition of public entertainment dating back hundreds of years.

It was here in 1662 that the diarist Samuel Pepys noted the first Punch and Judy show in the country. Music and other performances are licensed all year round, except for Christmas Day. Of course, you can book a trad performance from places like London Theatre Bookings, though I’ll leave you to judge whether the people in my pic are fact or fake – tourists or performance artists… your call!

As for shops, well, most tastes are catered for – even computer users get a look in, if they care to visit the splendid Apple Store, carved out of an elegant Georgian building. If you simply want to relax over a drink, you can’t do much better than the Crusting Pipe (below) a wine bar that’s been in the historic Market Hall since 1980.

The subject of wind turbines seems to polarize opinion very quickly indeed – people tend to love them or hate them.

Readers of certain popular newspapers are often loudest among the haters, whereas myself and and others I know are more philosophical, as at least the power from a turbine comes ‘free’.

Leaving aside arguments about possible dangers to birds and bats, the biggest difficulty is that wind turbines work best in high, exposed places, and that’s where England’s areas of outstanding natural beauty tend to be.

Having said that, in a future time turbines should not be too difficult to dispose of – one can be erected in just a few days, and dismantled in about the same time. At least we’re not talking about radioactive waste, with a half-life of several thousand years.

In fact, I reckon a gleaming white turbine can look extremely handsome, and we do need power, after all. This one is situated in a part of Gloucestershire called Lynch Knoll, having been there for just over 16 years, and was itself the subject of a five-year planning battle before finally being commissioned on ‘Friday the 13th’, December 1996.

There was no ill-luck in that commission date though, as the Lynch Knoll wind turbine has steadily generated enough power to keep more than 200 homes heated and lit since then. The turbine stands alone in a large field, mostly with just grass and cows for company. At other times, the next field hosts dirt-bike racing round an off-road track – and at a good meet, a hundred or more cars may be parked nearby.

So there’s plenty of action, dust and noise, while the turbine continues to swoosh around in the breeze. Which is worse, dirt racing or wind turbine? Or maybe both are OK in small doses…

In either case, the skies retain their beauty, and the turbine’s shapely silhouette seems pleasing to the eye. Well, I think so, but I leave it to you to judge from this sunset photograph I took while there.

The scene was deserted, except for an alert hound – so I didn’t go tooo close!