Old England

More differences. British rain is soft, gentle and pervasive. As I sit and write this, there is a fine tracery of silver drops on the window, a delicate curtain of light. That doesn't happen in Houston where the summer storms unleash a rushing fury of fat wet bullets onto road and roof.

Of course the difference I can't get over with America is that it is just so new: shiny and young. Like a young adult, it is perhaps sometimes too earnest, too eager, when British sensibilities might tend to dry reticence.

I'm happy to think of us as a nation of fuddy-duddies and whilst we have been catching up with family and friends I have been revelling in the dusty dotage of England.

Last week we were in Leicestershire where we visited the house where Lady Jane Grey grew up - now a stately ruin set amongst parkland, overrun by peacocks and deer. We also went to the site of the Battle of Bosworth, which is where I took the picture at the top.

Billed by the visitors' centre as the 'second most important battle in English history' with the tag-line 'Two Kings, One Day', Bosworth, fought in 1485, was the decisive battle in the Wars of the Roses - a dynastic struggle for the crown between generations of rival heirs that took up all of the fifteenth century.

The Plantagenet ruling family splintered into Yorkists (white rose) and Lancastrians (red rose) who fought, usurped and executed each other into extinction until, at Bosworth, the last Plantagenet king (maligned Richard III) was defeated and killed by an upstart princeling called Henry Tudor.

It may be five-hundred years ago, but this is all desperately recent stuff. Henry became Henry VII and after him came Henry VIII and he is essentially the central knot of English history, what with the Split from Rome and everything. To this day there remains a fierce rivalry between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, even if it is now limited largely to football and cricket matches.

Ooh, look! Speaking of cricket, here is some real village cricket being played on a real village green. Yesterday we went to dangle great-grandchildren in front of my grandfather who lives in a little village on the Wiltshire/Hampshire border. His house is right on the green and so were these chaps (albeit inbetween showers). I took W out to have a look and found myself having to explain not just cricket, but greens and even villages. There were maybe fifteen or twenty people watching and most of them were players. At the end of each over, the scorer hoisted up a board of numbers above his head and pointed it at us for us to see, waiting until I'd nodded or waved before he turned away. It was achingly quiet, only the sounds of the game and the breeze in the trees could be heard.

The cricket is quite new compared with the Tudors - organised village games only began in the seventeenth century - but the green and the thatched cottages around it present a scene which is older than England itself: for over a thousand years people have lived like this.

It's bewildering. But I'm about to head off for a pub lunch in Salisbury - if that can't help me find some perspective, nothing can.