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I think I’m not going to listen to Radio4 any more. Not news or current affairs, anyway. Saturday morning and I’m eating half a pink grapefruit while I wait for the mushroom & parmesan omelette to transform itself magically from stuff in a pan to yum and there’s a piece on living standards. Someone else has written a report about the British economy, such as it is. The report says it’s basically shagged, that consumers, in the new parlance ‘people at the bottom’ have seen their wages decline in real terms, meaning that they might have had a pay rise but things cost more so they’ve actually got less.

Even before the substance of the report you notice how the discussion has changed. Ordinary people who buy things in shops are now called ‘people at the bottom.’ Which obviously implies there are people at the top. So what do they buy? Do they go to Waitrose instead of Asda? Maybe. They probably send someone to do it for them though. Do they buy two jars of marmalade instead of one? No, but they probably don’t get the Asda value one for 49p. When they want a new pair of shoes, do they buy four hundred pairs instead of one, given that they earn four hundred times as much? Er, well, actually…..

Obviously, even the most infantile trickle down supporter wouldn’t claim this is what happened, even though that’s the basis of the entire post 1980’s economy – if the rich get more they’ll give it to other people, because it’s a well-known economic fact that rich people got rich by spending lots of money.

Except it isn’t but never mind. We don’t do facts anymore, as the two experts on Radio Four proved. Why is all this happening? It’s yer immigrants, innit, said one.

It would have been nicer if that’s what he actually said, but he used a voice like mine and we don’t speak or sound like that. We speak clearly and authoritatively and quite often people listen to what we say, because what we say sounds like the truth. The snag is it’s just our voices. That’s what they’re like. Sometimes they make people believe things that just aren’t true and do things they don’t want to do, because they think they have to. But it’s just our voices. That’s how it works. Ask any Springer spaniel.

The other expert politely told him that what he was saying was bollocks, but she made a basic error in bothering to be polite instead of simply telling him not to talk shit. She asked him for any evidence that what he said was true, that the massively growing inequality between ‘people at the top’ and everyone else was down to immigrants.

Which was where she lost, as she should have known she would because we don’t do facts any more. He didn’t have any evidence, he said. But he felt that was true. Game over.

Exactly like Blair and Iraq, exactly like Brown and any statistics, exactly like Ian Duncan Smith and his ideas about the feckless, fraudulent, workshy poor, or ‘anybody on benefits’ to use the current shorthand, we don’t do facts any more. We do feelings. Apparently all you have to do now is feel something is true and because we’re all so sensitive and perceptive and mindful these days, it’s sacrilege to contradict them. Feelings are sacred. If anyone even attempts to say your feelings are in total contradiction of facts they simply aren’t going to be invited back on the programme. Like the Greens. Who needs them and their facts on the radio every morning?

Rude, you see. Very, very rude. Don’t know how to behave in public. Lunatic fringe. If they want to behave like that then there’s Speakers Corner every Sunday. Real people, the kind we want telling us all what to do, they feel things. And that’s much more important than knowing anything real. I blame the immigrants, meself.

I used to travel a lot as part of my work in a succession of motoring embarassements from my proto-Yuppie red VW Golf , through Escorts and the one I thought summed up the company it was bought by most of all, the sleazy crappy exhaust falling off white XR3i I was given by a company that pretended to be oh-so-reputable before it organised Abu Ghraib. For once, the phrase Yuppie Scum was appropriate, attached to them.

The Golf. I loved that car. I nearly killed a French teenager in that, in Toulon when he rode his scooter into it but the fact that he was clearly going too fast and I think also, bluntly, he was a black kid and I wasn’t, I never heard anything more about it after he bounced off my windscreen. Someone who’s now an American horticulturalist lived in that car for a couple of days while she sorted out one of those things that are brilliantly funny stories a long time later at a dinner party and an impenetrable world of crap while you’re actually doing them. But that wasn’t the car’s fault.

I drove up to Cannock Chase one day in that Golf to do something in Birmingham I can’t remember now and didn’t care much about then. I liked those trips though. I’d get all the visits done by about four at the latest, then in those pre-satnav days, either go by map avoiding the motorways or just point the car in the direction of my house and make it up. I wanted to see the country I lived in.

I found totally forgotten Georgian market towns bypassed by the railway. Cities that had lost their people. Traffic jams in the middle of nowhere that once meant someone dead on a small motorcycle at the end of the queue, spires and trees and blue roads in the dusk.

And Cannock Chase. I stopped to get a local paper, another thing I did then to get an idea about different places. I wasn’t happy where I lived, long before I realised that follows you around until you deal with it and I kept thinking that like Horace Greeley, all I had to do was go West, or as I was brought up there, north, or maybe south, or east. Anywhere, really. Anywhere that looked nice and in order to see if it was I got the papers to see what happened there, whether places were the kind of place where the newspaper deals in armed sieges or lost dogs returned to their owners. It doesn’t always work, of course. A friend from uni – well, you know what I mean – ended up in Shewsbury thinking it was quiet and idyllic and found that as the only psychiatric social worker for twenty miles she more than once found herself hauled out of the pub by the police to go and help when someone had barricaded themselves in a Telford tower block with a 12-bore. They didn’t think it was funny when she asked if she could borrow one of their guns if they wanted her to go in there and get the person out.

There were two things I remember about the Cannock trip. One was getting the local paper and reading about a century old murder in the woods there, and the more disturbing news that someone had been found murdered with the same name there a century later. I’ve tried but I can’t remember what town it was, let alone what newspaper, or where their archives might be kept to follow that up. The other thing was urgently needing to find a bathroom and thinking I was going to be another murder suspect as a result.

I grew up in farming country. We have fields, and hedges and lanes and when you’re driving along and need to get rid of some well, obviously not beer, officer, orange juice perhaps, or tea, then you stop your car in a field gateway and go behind a hedge. It’s what you do. Well, it’s what we did, anyway and I still can’t personally see anything wrong with it so long as nobody can see you. This time I couldn’t find a real lane until suddenly I did, which was just as well as I could hardly walk by that time, English garages not generally having bathrooms, or certainly not then and not there anyway.

The lane became a gravel track but it was overlooked by a busy road up above it until it became a grass track shaded by trees. I got out there. It was a hot day with no-one around and just the distant noise of the busy road in the distance. As I was standing there I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Something moving, the same height as a person would be. I looked up quickly and saw it there and felt cold all over.

A white camisole set was hanging on a bush, complete, the wind raising the silk a little every now and then. Nobody there. Except there obviously had been. And I was only guessing they weren’t still there. I had a bad feeling about that place. For years I had episodes where I imagined I was sitting in a police interview room, having an endless conversation.

“So you say you never met this woman. Never even heard of her.” Distinctly un-Inspector Morse-like police officer stands up. “Except you did, son. You stabbed her about fifteen times, scraped some leaves over her then pissed on her body. Your DNA’s all over this poor tart you never met, according to you. So don’t keep messing me about ’cause I’m getting tired of it and me dinner’s on. Now, let’s go over this again.”

“With brandy-certain aim” described my own technique, once upon a time. It’s not nice. but Betjeman’s poems weren’t about nice. They were about real life, a vision of England much more real than many imagine, a summer’s meadow where the picnic usually has wasps.

So because I like you all so much, here, fantastically but true, is nearly a whole hour of Betjeman set not only to music but to film.

Things to note are my mother at 2:30 (not actually her, but it may as well have been) and the literal dance macabre late at the party.

As for the late-flowering lust stuff, obviously, I couldn’t possibly comment.

And btw, the teddy bear in Brideshead was Betjeman’s. He was nothing like Sebastian n any other respect, although perhaps he wished he was.