Back to Blighty, a Letter from England

Abstract

Returning to England's green and pleasant land after a very long absence is a strange and confusing experience. In spite of the negative consequences of two outstanding factors - Britain's astonishing and unrelenting prosperity and the density of the urban population - Blake's description still applies. You can be, at ten o'clock in the morning, apparently mired hopelessly in a massive traffic blockage on the M25, London's orbital motorway, and yet by lunchtime picnicking peacefully with several newly shorn sheep and a horse, in a luscious mown field on the South Downs, unbothered by a human soul, with butterflies and blackbirds the only fast-movers under a perfect blue and fluffy-white sky.