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So then, where do I begin, if I am to list the doubts about the end to which Ken’s vision might bring us? With the kinds of catering establishments bound to be clogging the skimpy
pavements bordering the already sclerotic tarmac, al fresco Burger Kings and Pizza Huts, KFCs and Kebaboramas, Starbucks and Bella Pastas and Slug & Lettuces? With their rowdy 24/7 lagered
clientele, undraped beer-bellies lobstering in the sun, gobbing at the stationary traffic four feet from the table they are waiting to throw at the Man U chara-convoy which cellphoned pickets have
told them is just coming off the M1? With the million class-actions brought by fast-food, booze and fag addicts, not to mention as many diesel-wheezers, hoping to empty the coffers of the man who,
at a stroke, doubled their exposure to all of the above? Maybe that alone will stay his hand.

But it may not help. I hear there is an alternative plan to demolish the flood-barriers and let the Thames fill London. Why not? It worked for Venice.

D
URING
a recent fireside chat, my dear chum Libby Purves made my spirits soar. Not, of course, for the first time; but
never yet so aptly, since what she was addressing was what makes spirits plummet, and what to do about it. Despite the dispiriting news that 31 million prescriptions were last year scrawled for
them, she was tooting the horn for antidepressants. Purves says Prozac’s all right.

Now, I am not normally depressed. But as shades of the pension house begin to close upon the growing boy, there are moments when I find myself staring into drizzle which isn’t actually
there; and yesterday, willy-nilly, it started coming down cats and dogs, because, before I ran into Libby, I had just read the Essex University report claiming that a better cure for depression
than pills was a walk in the country.

My boots filled with sunken heart: for if I ever get depressed enough to need a walk in the country, I shall come home twice as depressed as I was before. I have done walks in the country when I
was not at all depressed, and though I would set off like Julie Andrews, I would come back like Edvard Munch. That is because nothing makes me glummer than not knowing anything, and nothing has
anything I know less about than the country. The country is another country: they do things differently there.

Oh, look, a tree. A larch? A beech? A birch? To me, they are as indistinguishable as the Wodehouse butlers they might as well be. The only tree I can identify is a horse-chestnut, but only if it
has conkers on. What bird was that? I have a field guide, let me look it up, did it have a red speck on its beak, a green flash on its tail? It shot by like a feathered bullet, so who can say? Was
it ‘plink-plink-plink’ it trilled, or ‘tok-tok-tok’? Have I just seen an auk?

Aha, a field! Meadow? Dale? Wold? Let me negotiate this stile for a better view, if only of the nearest chiropractor. See, there are wild flowers! Of some kind. Possibly a variety of wort. I
have heard there are a lot. Shall I eat this berry? Is it a sloe, a hip, or a thing for which the only antidote has immediately to be flown in from Sarawak? And might this be a farmer’s dog
bounding towards me? When will it stop bounding? Where is the bloody farmer? Is the dog protecting a cow which has appeared between me and the stile, or is it drawing a bull’s attention to a
vulnerable limper? Let me pop through this hedge which, goodness me, has so prettily grown over a barbed wire fence; was it as much fun as this on the Somme?

But see, with 34 bounds I am free! I never liked that jacket anyhow, it stood between me and the bracing chill of sleet, and hopping furrows on one boot must do wonders for something, because
that is what the country is all about. It is very possibly what inspired Eli Lilly to hobble home to his snug, dungfree, gnatless, urban laboratory one soaking night and invent Prozac.

H
ERE
is a little riddle to keep you occupied until you’re ready for the next paragraph: what’s twice the price
of caviar and travels at half a mile an hour?

Well, clever old you. Fancy knowing that. I didn’t know it until just a few minutes back, because I am more old than clever, and thus all I know is that 53 years ago what travelled at half
a mile an hour was only twice the price of wine gums. And I know this because that is exactly what I paid for it.

Shall we extrapolate some quite remarkable facts from this? Such as the fact that what I once paid a shilling for is in all probability still travelling, and in covering, where’s that
calculator, 239,000 miles, not only has it not worn out, it has made itself worth 22,000 times more than I shelled out for it. Shelled out, for those who fell at the riddle hurdle, not coughed up:
I’m helping you as much as I can. You’ll agree that that is one hell of an investment; at least, it would be if I knew where it was, but since it has gone around the world ten times
since I last saw it, it could be anywhere. Sorry, I don’t want to mislead you, nor to exaggerate – those two authentic statistics having already made a mockery of exaggeration –
it couldn’t be anywhere in the world, it could only be anywhere in Britain, and mainland Britain, at that. Because not only is it worth its weight in gold, it has the same buoyancy. It cannot
handle sea. It sinks.

Now, on the outside chance that there may be a handful among those beaten by both the riddle and the subsequent big fat clue who have not yet, miraculously, lost patience with all of this and
turned gratefully to Jilly Cooper, where readers do not get mucked about, come with me, those few minutes back, to Palmer’s Pet Stores in Camden Town. I am standing outside it, because I have
not come to Camden Town to buy a pet, I have come to buy a leg of lamb, and you cannot buy a leg of lamb in Palmer’s – unless, I suppose, it is still attached, this is the world’s
greatest pet shop, it does everything – but, as I stand outside, an idea sidles into my head. It sidles there because I have stood here before, in the sweet lang syne of 1950, with a birthday
shilling hot in my hand. Thus I did not, on this latter morning, pass on to the butcher’s, I went into Palmer’s.

‘Do you,’ I said, ‘still sell tortoises?’

‘Upstairs,’ said the assistant. ‘Turn right at the spiders.’

So I did. It wasn’t easy: what he should have said was turn green at the spiders, because these were no ordinary spiders, these were giant crabs in ginger wigs, these were octopod kittens,
but I edged by somehow, and there, in the room next door, in a titchy glass box, was something about an inch across. I put my reading glasses on. It was a tortoise, all right. It may have looked up
at me. It was hard to tell; it could have been lifting its tail.

‘Do you have anything larger?’ I said. ‘I might lose this little chap in the garden; he could be trodden on, he could be swallowed by a cat, he could be lifted by a crow. He
might even be dragged away by ants.’

‘She,’ said the salesman (what eyesight!), ‘isn’t ready for the garden yet. You’d have to keep her in a vivarium until she was big enough to look after herself.
It’d take a good few years, mind.’

‘How much is she?’ I asked.

‘£300,’ he replied.

You all know what I said next, after I had steadied myself on the counter and stared at him for a bit, because you have been there with me. ‘The last tortoise I bought here,’ I said,
‘cost me a shilling.’

‘How much was a shilling?’ he said.

‘Put it this way,’ I said, ‘for £300 in 1950, I could’ve bought six thousand tortoises. I’d be rich man now. I’d be worth two million quid. Make that
five million: mine was as big as a brick. You could mistake this one for a snail.’

‘Yours would have been imported,’ said the assistant. ‘They used to come in by the truckload, but there’s laws now. This one was born and bred here. She’s
English.’

‘I’ll keep my voice down, then,’ I said. ‘I’d hate to upset her. Don’t you think £300 is a bit steep for a tortoise the size of my watch?’

‘She’s cheaper than a pedigree dog,’ he said. ‘Buy a puppy for £300, it’ll live 15 years. If you’re lucky. That’s £20 a year. This tortoise
could live to 100. So each year costs only three quid.’ He grinned. ‘Also, on your reckoning, she could be worth a couple of billion by then.’

‘You’re not wrong,’ I said, ‘but there’s just one snag.’

‘Which is?’

‘I’d have to live to 165,’ I said, and I went out, and round the corner, and got change out of a tenner. You know where you are, with a leg of lamb.

A
S
you know, many supermarkets, local authorities, and even some branches of the Royal British Legion have stopped
issuing pins with poppies this year, lest people not merely prick their fingers, but also claim compensation for wounds. Understandable, given these poignant memoirs of one veteran Poppy Day
survivor, which I make no excuse, on this special day, for quoting:

There was three of us up there that morning, in the thick of it as per usual, me, Chalky White and Nobby Clarke. The rain was coming down stair-rods, the wind went through you like a wossname,
knife, but the mud was the worst. Slip off the pavement and you was done for; the lads do not call white vans whizz-bangs for nothing, you never hear the one that gets you.

Anyway, we was all keeping our heads down, because there was poppy-sellers all over; they’d moved up in the night and now they was in position everywhere, but you couldn’t hardly see
most of them, they are crafty buggers, you got to give them that, you see an empty doorway, you reckon you’re all right, and suddenly they spring out from nowhere, they are on you before you
know it. That is how they got Chalky that morning: we was creeping along, staying close to the wall, we was all but at the pub, we could hear blokes getting ’em in, we could smell roll-ups,
and then Chalky only goes and sticks his head over the top for a shufti, and suddenly me and Nobby hears that terrible rattle what is like nothing else on God’s earth, and poor old Chalky
finds hisself looking down the wrong end of a collecting tin.

Course, me and Nobby stood up as well, it is one for all and all for one in our mob, and we marched out, heads up, bags of swank, and Chalky shouts: ‘Wiffel ist es, Kamerad?’ because
he has always been a bit of a wag, he does not let things get him down, nil carborundum, and this woman takes his ten pee and she gives him one of them looks they have, they are not like us, never
will be, and hands him a poppy and a pin, and he says, ‘Aren’t you going to pin it on for me, Fraulein?’ and she says, ‘You want a lot for ten pee,’ so I say,
‘Leave it out, Chalky, it is not worth it, I’ll do it, come here,’ and I hold the poppy against his lapel and I take the pin and Chalky says, ‘Is this the Big Push
they’re always going on about?’ and I laugh so much that the pin goes and sticks right in my finger.

Blood gushed out. I must have lost very nearly a blob. ‘Stone me!’ yells Nobby. ‘That is a Blighty one and no mistake. You will have to go straight home and put an Elastoplast
on it.’ Chalky looks at the woman. ‘This is the bravest man I know,’ he says. ‘He has got his knees brown, he has done his bit, but that does not mean he likes the taste of
cold steel up him. Look at that finger of his. It will not grow old as we that are left grow old. It may very well end up with a little scar on it. It might even turn sceptic and drop off into some
corner of a foreign wossname, he will never be able to find it. So gimme my ten pee back.’

At this, despite the agony and spots before the eyes, I wade in, too; do not call me a hero, mind, I was just doing what any man would do in the circumstances, you would do the same. ‘As
soon I get this finger seen to,’ I inform her, ‘I shall be using it to dial my brief!’

At this, she lets out a shriek, chucks the ten pee at us, and runs off. Typical or what? They do not have no bottle, poppy-sellers: oh, sure, they may look hot as mustard quartered safe behind
their lines, parading up and down outside Harrods in their spotless Barbours and their cashmere twinsets, with the sun winking off of their diamand brooches, and all smelling of Channel 4, but it
is a very different matter up the sharp end in Lewisham, there is more to poppying out here than bull and bloody blanco. Me and Nobby and Chalky watched her skedaddle, and we gave a bit of a cheer,
and then Nobby took my feet and Chalky held me under the arms, and they carried me past a number of material witnesses into the Rat and Cockle, and Chalky went off to get them in, and Nobby lit a
fag and put it in my mouth, and he said: ‘Could have been worse, mate – suppose it had been her what had stuck it in Chalky? He would have been pushing up daisies by now.’

‘She might have got both of you,’ I said. Nobby shook his head. ‘No chance. One of ’em tried once, caught me off guard, took a quid off of me and before I could stop her
she had shoved a pin straight through my lapel. It might have done me serious mischief if it wasn’t for the Bible I always keep in my breast-pocket. I found it in a hotel bedroom, you
know.’

‘Bloody lucky,’ I said. ‘It could so easily have been a towel.’

‘Or a rubber shower-mat,’ said Chalky, setting down the drinks.

‘A man needs a bit of luck,’ said Nobby, ‘out here.’

I
T
is a sobering thought – unless you tied on something so celebratory last night as to leave you squinting at this
through one throbbing eye, in which case a raw egg in a quart of espresso would doubtless serve you better – that if Athens had been only a mile down the road as Pheidippides flew, you would
have had nothing to celebrate, since Sir Ranulph Fiennes would have spent last week at home with his feet up, watching
Countdown
. He would not have been blistering those feet around the
world, 26 miles and 385 yards at a time, in his madcap triumph of running a marathon on seven continents in seven days, because there would be no such thing as a marathon.