MERRIE ENGLAND
At this time of the year in the countryside, given a couple of days break in the cloud layer & temperatures that slip a notch above the seasonal norm, something ineffably magical happens. Defying the driest of English irony & the most palsied of English upper lips, the immanence of summer in England is suddenly apparent to all. Something vibrates in the febrile air; people stop in the street & look up into the sky; &, against all training & protocol, strangers greet each other.
And if one is actually amongst ëthe groves, the copses & the meadowsí, as I was this morning, driving through rural North-East Hertfordshire, the impact is all the greater. Stop the car & youíll hear the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Look around & youíll realise that youíre in a sort of bosky limbo between Housmanís Land of Lost Content & Holstís Another Country. And everywhere, above & below, is the hum of the force that drives the green fuse through the flowerÖ
I am, of course, trying very hard indeed to be ironic; to diminish through parody the full effect of something that actually has real substance & power. I have no religious faith; I feel none of the urgings of that darkest of secular allegiances, patriotism; I do not believe that Arthur will rise again &, with a miraculously unrusted Excalibur, liberate us from the current oppressor. My childhood memories of rustic Kent, whilst vivid & subject to a little pinkish embellishment in the recalling, donít dominate my sense of how things were way back when. The manifestly ordinary, workaday present is more important to me than any notions of a haloed past or a bright world to come.
So this wholly unexpected uprush of elation that infects the spirit without warning on a summerís day somewhere in rural England (or Wales & Scotland) always ambushes me & leaves me baffled. And I generally settle for baffled because those rationalisations that always follow enquiry & will not easily be uprooted make me feel uncomfortable. Itís as if behind the bulwark of radical convictions, the fierce rejection of the myth of Merrie England, there lurks the unreconstructed soul of an old buffer, a tweedy, harrumphing (gulp) conservative who is at his happiest when stumping across the furrows with a stout willow stick & a good dog.
Because when allís said & done I actually feel a strong & deep connection with the country of my birth. There are parts of it in which I feel comprehensively at home. The West Kent orchards, now fast disappearing under South-East London spillage. The Surrey Hills where I walked with my parents. The Hampshire heathlands where I used to live & the Sussex Downs, where Emma was born & where she grew up. The Yorkshire Dales where I went to school. My parents lived in the south of France & year after year during my kidsí childhood & adolescence we spent idyllic summers in the dry, white heat by the ridiculously blue Mediterranean. But I could never quite convince myself that here amongst the olive trees, the lavender fields, the cicadas I could happily end my days. I would miss the thick, dark- green trees growing in the moist earth, &, yes, the rain rattling against the windows.
And thatís the best I can do for love of country. I am indifferent to flags, monarchy, traditions, the crass backyard imperialism that seeks to turn Englandís absurdly contradictory topography into some kind of national homogeneity. England is where I was born & itís where I live. I belong to it in some indefinable organic sense & it belongs to me. And in truth, behind that barrage of passionate beliefs about how we live now & how we might live differently, Iím comfortable with this kind of love of country.
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Donít touch that dial! Tomorrow I shall address you on the subject ofÖthe return of that most English of birds, the skylark.
10:38:36 PM 
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