There are moments in life, rare ones, but moments all the same, when you are completely delighted with the culture that you live in.

To have one’s being among people who think that feeding wild birds a natural part of life is good enough: but when we start earnest debate about what kind of food will do the birdies the most good, I feel as if I never want to live anywhere else.

This is my home: I am proud to exist in a country where a national newspaper can examine the question of whether bread is extremely good for a bird or, on the contrary, extremely bad. Can you imagine them addressing such a vital question in, say, France? Or China? Or the United Arab Emirates?

But it is part of the British way: to revel in the sharing of resources with wild creatures. We happily share our space and even our food. We like to see the birds up close, we like to have them half-wild half-tame and, as it were, confiding with us, and we love the quiet pleasure of helping them out.

It is, I think, the legacy of the Romantic movement, which was stronger on this island than in most other places. The Romantic movement brought with it a belief that nature matters, not only for human convenience but for itself: that we humans are incomplete without the nonhuman world.

It hasn’t made us better than any other nations in terms of development, pollution, habitat destruction in the name of agriculture and transport and so forth: but least we know, by counting the nation’s bird tables, that such ruination goes against the grain of the country. We may be losing our wild places and our wild creatures as fast as everyone else, but at least we know it matters.

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