Yesterday, my dear chum Libby 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 turned to Libby, I 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, there is no question but 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? A maple? 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 dung-free gnatless urban laboratory one soaking night, and invent Prozac.

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