I went back outside to see what I could get for my .350,000. The answer was a smallish but ornate home on a modest plot with an interesting view of a nineteenthcentury mental hospital. I can't say that it was what I had always dreamed of. All the houses were built of red brick, with oldfashioned chimney pots, gingerbread trim and other small nods to the Victorian age. One model, rather mundanely known as House Type D, even had a decorative tower. The result was that they looked as if they had somehow been pupped by the sanatorium. You could almost imagine them, given sufficient time, growing into sanatoria themselves. Insofar as such a thing can work at all, it worked surprisingly well. The new houses didn't jar against the backdrop of the old sanatorium and at least something that surely wouldn't have happened a dozen years ago that great old heap of a building, with all its happy memories for me and generations of the interestingly insane, had been saved. I doffed my hat to the developers and took my leave. I had intended to stroll up to my old house, but it was a mile off and my feet were sore. Instead, I headed down Stroude Road, past the site of the old hospital social club, now replaced by a dwelling of considerable ugliness, and the scattered buildings that had once been hostels for nursing and domestic staff, and bet myself .100 that the next time I passed this way they would be gone and replaced by big houses with double garages.

 I walked the two miles to Egham, and called at the house of a delightful lady named Mrs Billen who is, among her many other selfless kindnesses, my motherinlaw. While she bustled off to the kitchen in that charming flutter with which all English ladies of a certain age receive sudden guests, I warmed my toes by the fire and reflected (for such was my state of mind these days) that this was the first English house I had ever been in, other than as a paying guest. My wife had brought me here as her young swain one Sunday afternoon many years before and we had sat, she and I and her family, tightly squeezed into this snug and wellheated loungewatching Eullseye and The Generation Game and other televisual offerings that seemed to me interestingly lacking in advanced entertainment value. This was a new experience for me. I hadn't seen my own family in what might be called a social setting since about 1958, apart from a few awkward hours at Christmases, s.o there was a certain cosy novelty in finding myself in the midst of so much familial warmth. It is something that I still very much admire in the British, though I confess a certain passing exultation when I learned that they were taking Bullseye off the air.

 My motherinlaw Mum appeared with a tray of food such as made me wonder for a moment if she had mistaken me for a party of lumberjacks. As I greedily tucked into a delicious, steaming heap that brought to mind the Cairngorms recreated in comestible form, and afterwards sat slumped with coffee and a happily distended stomach, we chattered away about this and that the children, our impending move to the States, my work, her recent widowhood. Late in the evening late, that is, for a couple of oldtimers like us she went into bustling mode again and after making a great deal of industrioussounding noises from every quarter of the house, announced that the guest room was ready. I found a neatly turneddown bed complete with hotwater bottle and, after the most cursory of ablutions, crawled gratefully into it, wondering why it is that the beds in the houses of grandparents and inlaws are always so deliciously comfortable. I was asleep in moments.

 CHAPTER SIX

 AND SO TO BOURNEMOUTH. I ARRIVED AT FIVETHIRTY IN THE EVENING in a driving rain. Night had fallen heavily and the streets were full of swishing cars, their headlights sweeping through bullets of shiny rain. I'd lived in Bournemouth for two years and thought I knew it reasonably well, but the area around the station had been extensively rebuilt, with new roads and office blocks and one of those befuddling networks of pedestrian subways that compel you to surface every few minutes like a gopher to see where you are.

 By the time I reached the East Cliff, a neighbourhood of mediumsized hotels perched high above a black sea, I was soaked through and muttering. The one thing to be said for Bournemouth is that you are certainly spoiled for choice with hotels. Among the many gleaming palaces of comfort that lined every street for blocks around, I selected an establishment on a sidestreet for no reason other than that I rather liked its sign: neat capitals in pink neon glowing beckoningly through the slicing rain. I stepped inside, shedding water, and could see at a glance it was a good choice clean, nicely oldfashioned, attractively priced at .26 B & B according to a notice on the wall, and with the kind of smothering warmth that makes your glasses steam and brings on sneezing fits. I decanted several ounces of water from my sleeve and asked for a single room for two nights.

 'Is it raining out?' the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm.

 'No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.''Oh, yes?' she went on in a manner that made me suspect she was not attending my words closely. 'And will you be dining with us tonight, Mr ' she glanced at my watersmeared card 'Mr Brylcreem?' I considered the alternative a long slog through stairrods of rain and felt inclined to stay in. Besides, between her cheerily beansized brain and my smeared scrawl, there was every chance they would charge the meal to another room. I said I'd eat in, accepted a key and drippingly found my way to my room.

 Among the many hundreds of things that have come a long way in Britain since 1973, and if you stop to think about it for even a moment you'll see that the list is impressively long, few have come further than the average English hostelry. Nowadays you get a colour TV, coffeemaking tray with a little packet of modestly tasty biscuits, a private bath with fluffy towels, a little basket of cottonwool balls in rainbow colours, and an array of sachets or little plastic bottles of shampoo, bath gel and moisturizing lotion. My room even had an adequate bedside light and two soft pillows. I was very happy. I ran a deep bath, emptied into it all the gels and moisturizing creams (don't be alarmed; I've studied this closely and can assure you that they are all the same substance), and, as a fiesta of airy bubbles began their slow ascent towards a position some three feet above the top of the bath, returned to the room and slipped easily into the selfabsorbed habits of the lone traveller, unpacking my rucksack with deliberative care, draping wet clothes over the radiator, laying out clean ones on the bed with as much fastidiousness as if I were about to go to my first highschool prom, arranging a travel clock and reading, material with exacting precision on the bedside table, adjusting the lighting to a level of considered cosiness, and finally retiring, in perky spirits and with a good book, for a long wallow in the sort of luxuriant foam seldom seen outside of Joan Collins movies.

 Afterwards, freshly attired and smelling bewitchingly of attar of roses, I presented myself in the spacious and empty dining salon and was shown to a table where the array of accoutrements a wineglass containing a red paper napkin shaped into a floret, stainlesssteel salt and pepper shakers resting in a little stainlesssteel boat, a dish containing wheels of butter carefully shaped like cogs, a smallnecked vase bearing a sprig of artificial lilies instantly informed me that the food would be mediocre but presented with a certain wellpractised flourish. I covered my eyes, counted to four and extended my right hand knowing it would alight on a basket of bread rolls proffered by a hovering waiter a mastery of timing that impressed him considerably, if I may say so, and left him in no doubt that he was dealing with a traveller who knew his way around creamy green soups, vegetables served with nested spoons and circlets of toughened rawhide parading under the name medallions of pork.