More money helps fund the fun in Hong Kong too; the average expat household income is up to 50 per cent higher than in Britain, according to some estimates, with many expats still amusingly given a “hardship allowance” from companies after making the move.

The improvement of Britain’s standing in continental Europe can only go so far until the UK finds a stable and constructive way of interacting with the EU as a whole, rather than just with individual countries or groups. If you go over your personal allowances when bringing personal goods into the UK, you must make a declaration and pay any tax and duty due. The conviction that the past was better speaks to our current anxieties. If Philippa Lowthorpe and Andrea Gibb are looking for another book to adapt for a film corrective to modern life, they should try Robin Stevens’s cunning series of novels Murder Most Unladylike, set in a boarding school in 1935, about two girls who run a detective agency. “Bother,” says Hazel in Murder Most Unladylike at one point. “Daisy, my pullover’s in the gym.” Bother? Pullovers? Is there any thing more vexing than misplacing one’s knitwear? Not in this corner of Downtonshire there isn’t.Covid has given Beijing the excuse to turn Hongkongers into obedient citizens,” says another expat still there. “So if there’s one case of a kid testing positive, the entire school is closed down and your children can literally be taken away from you to quarantine.” Si sa, quando si parla di narrativa di viaggio, io mi sciolgo e cerco sempre qualcosa di sfizioso, che possa in qualche modo attirare la mia attenzione. So, in short, the countryside was full of people wanting to go places and see things. During the First World War there were 331 Stage Bus operators, by 1930 there were 3,962 and by 1932 busses carried more passengers than the rail network. At the same time there was an explosion in car ownership. In 1918 there had been no more than 100,000 private motor cars, but by 1939 there were two million. The internal combustion engine took people to places that railways and even motor buses could not. The countryside and its monuments were now, for the first time, permeable to almost everyone.

I think it’s important to gauge public feeling rather than putting out garish newspaper headlines about how they’re going to do it all tomorrow,” he says. Where do Europe’s lynxes live?

Caesar wrote, " The Britons have a huge number of cattle, they use gold coins or iron bars as their money, and produce tin and iron." That description helps to explain why Caesar and his army decided to pile over here to Britain to try to invade. Rome wanted to get its hand on all those British resources to make itself even richer. One of the lynxes on Gow’s farm in Devon. He says the three he has are too tame to let out into the wild. Photograph: Alexander Turner/The Guardian Country Life also took up the role of mouthpiece and campaigner for the preservation of the countryside. It linked itself to other campaigning bodies such as the Council for the Protection of Rural England and the National Trust and argued for protective and planning measures in statute. Its concerns were not limited to countryside matters for it was at the forefront of arguing for the preservation of Wren’s City Churches, Nash’s Regent Street, Soane’s bank of England and Georgian squares. However it was the country house that most concerned Hussey and where his energies were most influential. The rural values expressed in the garden cities were a political mantra too. Stanley Baldwin The dominating political figure of the inter war years clearly saw the importance of England’s rural heritage. The First World War had a transforming effect on Baldwin’s outlook and opinions and on his political career. He was too old to fight and in 1916, with a healthy inheritance turned to politics with a determination to serve his country in a different capacity. In an important speech in 1931 he laid out his motivations for entering politics. He said that ‘after four years of slaughter and destruction many times four years would be needed to repair even part of what had been lost… and after such a storm should there not be calm, and would not the sun come out and the world be more beautiful than before?’