I had lunch yesterday with David Warner and we toasted our friend Pam Harris in mineral water. The former manageress of the Dirty Duck in Stratford-upon-Avon is in hospital for a gallstone operation, but is expected to be back and at it within a week or so.

Going to Stratford would simply not be the same without Pam. As a colleague said to me the other day, she exemplifies the spirit of the RSC before it became corporate. I am still recovering from the news that RSC employees, on stage and off, are banned from drinking alcohol at all times during the day.

Such a measure has no effect on Warner, who forsook alcohol many years ago. My favourite photo on the walls of the Duck shows him and Roy Dotrice supping pints in broad daylight. “Where is everyone?” Dotrice is saying;”They’ve gone home for breakfast,” replies the bespectacled Warner, legs dangling by the flower pots. We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

News that Pam was doing okay was imparted by her brother Bob, a sports journalist embedded this week at Wimbledon. My first question was, has Pam got a television to watch her favourite sporting event? Yes she has, says Bob, still reeling from the cost of installing a telephone and a television bedside service for her in Warwick General.

Even if I don’t have time to watch as much as I’d like, the onset of Wimbledon, like the imminent start of the Proms, heralds the summer in full bloom. In this spirit I had a pleasant awayday earlier this week to the Watermill in Bagnor, Berks, where rehearsals for the revival of Sunset Boulevard, directed by Strictly Come Dancing’s Mr Nasty, Craig Revel Horwood, are in full swing.

Artistic director Hedda Beeby tells me that the theatre has all but raised the £3m needed to buy the property from the previous owner, ex RSC administrator James Sargent, who has retired to Devon. Building has begun, too, on developing new administration and rehearsal rooms, and they are even refurbishing the accommodation for the actors!

The gardens and ponds look splendid at the moment and we sat near a little bridge where my son and I played Pooh sticks many years ago when we came down to see Once Upon A Mattress, a delightful 1959 musical by Mary Rogers (it opened on Broadway ten days before Gypsy) based on the legend of the princess and the pea. 

It always amused me that the great actor Michael Hordern, a fanatical fisherman, had bought a weekend cottage in Bagnor to escape the hurlyburly of theatrical life, only to find someone — he was called David Gollings — turn up on his doorstep and build a new theatre right across the road.

Still, Hordern reconciled himself to the invasion and eventually became quite supportive. So did the late George Melly, another keen fisherman, who had a retreat in the village.

It will be inteesting to see how Sunset Boulevard survives on a budget of barely £140,000 and with a cast of ten doubling up on roles and instruments while Kathryn Evans belts out Norma Desmond. The run is almost sold out and can never recover even those modest costs. But then neither did the expensive London original, despite running for over three years in the West End.

The Watermill is a world elsewhere and I took the train back to London from Newbury wishing I didn’t have to. George V may have died with the words “Bugger Bognor” on his lips, but you’d never say the same of Bagnor. Bravo, Bagnor, more like.

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