During one of the days of recent grinding and relentless heat, I suddenly remembered, in graphic detail, a scene from a very different place and time.
At Glyndebourne in 1996 my wife and I went to the splendid new Opera House to see Handel's Theodora. At the long interval — designed deliberately to allow the audience a leisurely mid-performance meal — we retired to our reserved table on the wide, curving verandah overlooking the svelte, embowered gardens and dined on all sorts of marvels and drank very good champagne.
What was especially English about it was that we did so in a freezing wind that unfurled long lashes of rain in under the overhang of the roof, just failing each time to reach our table and its load of goodies. We didn't get wet and spirits remained high, but it was a heavily overcoated, scarfed and bonneted meal.
We stayed that weekend in the nearby village of Firle — white cottaged, murmurous with birds and cattle distantly lowing; raucous and welcoming down the pub end, steepled and lit by a cold sliver of moon at the cemetery end. Firle, where the cricket pavilion is the best new building in the village, and where, as we entered the cacophonous pub on Saturday night, a bloke at the door reassured us: 'Don't worry, they're noisy but they're only cricketers.'
Nudging through the flannelled fools towards the bar, it took only minutes for us to be identified as Australians, which gave rise to much cricket wit, many predictions, a couple of bets and a dare or two.
Though sliced up by far too many roads and menaced here and there by industrial and other incursions, the English countryside remains nevertheless one of the sleekest, most beautifully tended landscapes in the world. To Australian eyes its daunting constriction and sometimes prissy neatness are mitigated by breathtaking beauty, 'where every prospect pleases'.
Generations of Australian schoolchildren until well into the 1950s grew up with that English landscape, or some idealised version of it, dominant in their imaginations because those scenes were the main subject of the poems and stories they were given to read.
A distant world of hedgerows, barns, snow covered fields, smoke adrift in freezing air, spring arriving at last like soft brilliant shrapnel exploding through a grey land — these it seemed were the stuff of landscape, of Nature.
In comparison, the antipodean natural world seemed, until