England: the redeeming features

It was a wonderful day on Saturday, and we took advantage of it to go walking with a friend in one of most charming places we know: Ashridge Forest, about a forty-minute drive from where we live.

Ashridge Forest: lovely in autumn, lovely in any season

Our return to England, after five weeks of warmth and sunshine as well as clear roads, was made painful by the lousy weather and appalling traffic. Fortunately, England does have many glorious aspects to compensate. Saturday’s weather was one. As for Ashridge, where one can walk for miles though woods and fields, with occasional glimpses of deer, it’s right up there with the best of them.

These are the aspects of England, along with the friends we shall be leaving behind, that I shall miss when we complete our Brexit exit before the axe falls at the end of next March.

After Ashridge, our friend suggested we might like to head for the nearby market town of Tring, where there was an apple festival that day. That sounded like a good plan. I could already picture myself eating a sausage washed down with a pint of cider – I was planning to ask for pear cider, just to be perverse – at what I assumed would be cheerful, bustling fair.

Sadly, it was not to be. There’d be an apple parade in the morning, but by the time we showed up in town the festival was all over. Indeed, pretty much all that was left was to watch another friend and her Morris dancing group perform outside the Church.

Morris Dancing: more appealing than I'd expected

I’ve never been a great fan of Morris dancing, the rather strange custom mocked by many foreigners – indeed, by many English people – in which the dancers wear elaborate costumes decorated with bells, so they tinkle through the complex steps of the dances, accompanied by folk music played on traditional instruments, such as fiddles, guitars, squeezeboxes and tambourines. All a little weird. And yet, I have to admit, the group we saw was pretty impressive, the dancing spellbinding and highly skilful.

I think I could develop a taste for it, a discovery I’ve perhaps made a little late given that we’re about to leave the country where it has its roots.

The Morris dancing was outside the church, and it was inside it that I discovered the only trace of the apple festival: large sheets of paper on which people – children, I assume, for the most part – had glued cutouts of apples which they’d then coloured. I suppose it was gratifying to find some reminder of the festival, though it hardly made up for the brimming pint I’d promised myself and, in the absence of the sausage stand I’d been sure to find, it left me feeling hungry.

The closest we got to any apples. Let alone cider

The church smelled of incense, which suggested to me that it was probably High-Church: the Church of England isn’t content with being merely Protestant, it has currents running from the most Protestant Low-Church at one end of the spectrum, through Middle Church to the quasi-Catholic High Church at the other end. Fortunately, they don’t burn each other’s adherents anymore, so all these distinctions are now just part of the quaintness of English life.

Along with activities like Morris Dancing, festivals that are over so fast that you can miss them if you blink or pretty little market towns like Tring, which means places for the prosperous Middle Class to live and cultivate its charm.

The Church of St Peter and St Paul, Tring

I shall miss them all. Though perhaps not the church, fine though it was. If there’s one thing we’ve already found Spain isn’t short of, it’s Churches. Catholic, of course, almost without exception, but then the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Tring, with its scent of incense, isn’t really that different.

As for apples, well Danielle has plenty from her allotment. She'd turned a whole bunch of them into apple stew which we had with yoghurt when we got home. Pretty well made up for the lack of cider...