it’s been with me my whole life. I know it from the overcast Yorkshire gloom, dripping woods, blackwater streams and the bone-jolting judder of the rugby field. I know it from the scrub trees and bushes of howling motorway service stations and industrial parks, interviews with unsmiling men for jobs I didn’t want, the sweet relief of not getting them and another turn of the cards. I know it from Dear John ice-cold park walks, supermarket parking lots, dreary terrace gardens and the weeds growing out of locked up Grosvenor Square town houses. It’s the crayon green of public space Blighty, overgrown railway track sidings and roundabout reservations, plastic bags snagged in the branches. And I’ve ventured about in other lands and seen other greens, sunlit and balmy, but this is the one I always come back to. I didn’t choose it, I don’t like it or dislike it, but it dogs me. There’s no swerving my England green.
