And I really wish you weren’t. Because while there is much to love about a languid steam* through the rolling countryside. None of it includes the besuited human elements who have confused volume with importance.

If there were every a competition to crown the phrase most loaded with banality, a split decision would separate “Hello, 5:59 as usual, Yes back at 6:53, no I am still a boring and pointless twat” and “Please hold, your call is important to us“. With my casting vote, carriage-bore would receive both a small trophy and a first class excursion under the wheels of a passing train.

Yet, as the grimy suburbs of it-really-isn’t-that greater London were exchanged for the leafy smugness of Oxfordshire, my ire was drawn to the indisputable fact that the cockage to square foot ratio is even greater in our fine capital, than ten fat, middle aged men microwaving their ears in a doomed attempt to find someone who thinks they are worth listening to.

Let me furnish you with an example of how your average Londoner cares for nothing but himself**. During the now famous summer rains, navigating the broad streets of Bishopgate was somewhat hampered by an eye poking spikey roof. Looking upwards brought flashbacks of Hitchcock’s “The Birds” as sodding great Golf*** tarpaulins weaved in from all angles.

The only amusement was watching testosterone fuelled jousts of chicken as London-Man – cranked up to ramming speed – sallied forth like a first world war major heading over the top. The inevitable clash of brolly on brolly brought forth much swearing and no apologies. I swore too when the realisation that the bloke allegedly murdered by a poisoned umbrella tip had probably just been minding his own business on a busy street under rainy skies.

I pondered some more on this and other illustrative examples – Hotel rooms costing the same as cars, tube trains breaching almost all of the Human Right laws, Taxi’s having locked doors and no opening windows – to arrive at the inevitable conclusion that London is really shit, isn’t it?

Once I’d completed that rigorous analysis of 10 million people – and because the journey time back to Ledbury is better measured using units of glacial epochs – a slightly drunken conversation on the best cat recipes came floating back. The rather British Caterole was out pimped by the rather more cosmopolitan Catatoue and Cat L’orange. But my personal favourite was that old stable: Steak and Kitty pudding.

Don’t even try and do better. It took a damn fine bottle of red to create the definitive dead moggy cookbook, and it’s hard to see how that can be bettered.

* The coffee urn of nuclear death more than makes up for a lack of actual firebox waste products.

** Two mobile phones, one willy, zero politeness.

*** A pit offence even before size comes into it. What kind of sport needs an umbrella? You don’t even get that in snooker.