Helmintholog

My son Felix, who is half Swedish, speaks three regional dialects of English fluently — RP, or BBC English, which is what we speak at home; Essex/Estuary, which is what the aboriginals of Saffron Walden spoke when he worked in the Hamleys warehouse here; Belfast, where he was at university. All these had to be learnt separately, and there are some dialects he never mastered at all. Once, in Belfast, he was introduced to a Glaswegian freind of a friend who launched into a story and spoke, Felix swears, for eight minutes without more than one word being comprehensible. That word, emerging into sudden audibility from the middle of the talk, was “titwank”.

His friend Oskar stayed in Sweden but nurtured a passion for Jamaican music. He’s now studying journalism, and came over to London to do a project on cup clashes, which culminated in a trip to Straford to hear eight different sound systems competing. The bass was so loud it pushed the air from their lungs. He and Felix were the only whites in the room; and whenever a DJ said anything, Oskar was the only one who could understand a word of it.

To add a final note of international surreality, the winning outfit was Japanese.

The Arundell Arms in Lifton is the best country hotel in Britain. It has one imperfection: the shower in our room was psychotic, cycling unnervingly between freezing and scalding. But I like even that: if the showers had been perfect it would have been unnatural. I have never otherwise stayed in any luxury hotel where all the effort was put into supplying good things, rather than ostentatiously rare or luxurious ones. The food and wine are superb; the service is straightforward, friendly and efficient. the fishing — for me at least the point of the place — is extraordinary, not because the fish are huge or particularly easy to catch, but because they are wild trout in largely unspoilt countryside. It’s not wild. You’re fishing in farmland. But it is a mixture of pasture and woodland that seems very little changed over the last three centuries. More than anywhere else I know, it represents a kind of dream of the English countryside before it became “heritage” and though I don’t normally like this country much, that is something very precious.