A couple of years ago I moved back to the area in Oxfordshire in the Thames Valley where I was brought up.

It has barely changed in the many decades since I moved out to live in London, even down to the tree stump where I used to wait for the bus to take me home from primary school. There are some routes where reaching the brow of a hill provides a panorama of fields and woods stretching to the horizon on all sides and all this within an hour's drive of London in what is regarded as the most crowded part of a crowded island.