Look on the bright side

Because, of course, England has many advantages.

Here are three. I have thought of that many.

The people. England does eccentricity, oddness and madness better than any country in the world. I should know. I rub shoulders with the strange in home ed groups and fields.

Remember the man who loved lichens? He sported a great grey woolly beard like a lichen. His mum knitted his clothes out of a special kind of lichen wool. He wore felted lichen shoes. And my goodness, did he know a thing or two about lichens. Get him on that subject on the two-hour tour in the grey morning drizzle and the only way to shut him up was to hit him on the back of the head with a shovel.

The weather. One moment you will be bracing yourself against the lashing gales with a plastic roll up mac and a BHS brolly. The next you will be ripping off all your clothes to show us your M&S underwear. And with that prickly heat rash, you won't even care.

No one can make sense of this English weather. All I can say is that it invites such a bizarre assortment of dress that our local Tesco has a dress code. This is prompted not so much by inappropriate dress, rather the lack of any dress whatsoever should England have a drizzle of sunshine instead of rain. And those layers of pinky white phlobby bits, swollen milk bottle legs and enormous bellies are not only sported by the laydeez. Round here the pit bull terriers have them too.

The things we do. Shark, Tiger and Squirrel are looking forward to all our lovely educational outings. To fields, museums, holiday camps.

You won't have to wait long there, little gritlets. Come the weekend we're booked on a walk with a medicinal herbalist who knows a thing or two about rubbing dandelions over yourself to cure distemper. And you can guess where that will take place. Now all we have to do is decide whether to take the plastic macs or the factor 60.