The English countryside is wonderfully pleasant to travel through. We’ve done train trips to Lewes in East Sussex, Wivenhoe in Essex, Oxford and Reading in Oxfordshire and are now in Bath. The views from the train are of densely green hedgerows, golden fields of wheat, meandering rivers and the occasional church spire. Our friends have taken us on walks along rivers, through woods and villages, churchyards and high streets. I keep saying in my head “It’s so English”, which is nonsensical but also true. It is the England of countless poems, novels and films, so that even if it’s a first visit, one feels one knows it.

But there is also the spectacular. One gazes at the undulating South Downs and then is confronted with the stark white chalk cliffs along the English Channel coast in East Sussex. One takes a train to Bath through benign countryside only to be amazed by row upon row of immaculate Georgian terraced houses and the 2000-year-old baths of the settlement the Romans called Aquae Sulis, where they also erected a temple dedicated to the goddess Minerva. To say nothing of Oxford’s “dreaming spires”…