Matthew Engel has done a kind of latter day sainthood travelling in the footsteps of Nikolaus Pevsner by recounting and recalling every county by English county and recording the whole adventure in just one volume: Engel's England.
Interesting that it has taken two Jewish émigrés to record their adopted countries.
He approached me to check out some of his recollections of Kent especially those on Sittingbourne and Sheppey which he recorded on pages 188-201.
Of Sheppey he writes:
"In the middle is Sheppey, full of prisons, old people's homes and caravan sites, and it is not clear which of those might be regarded as the worst in which to end up."
He gives Sittingbourne a miss well almost. On page 194 he talks about cherries and orchards and sense and scents.
By the by, I introduced Matthew to his wife Hilary who was then a publisher at Pan Books back in 1987/8. They had a son Laurie who died aged 13 on 22nd September, 2005 of cancer. He wrote about his love affair with his son in Extracts from the Red Notebooks which has helped extraordinarily to raise £1m for a teenage cancer unit in Birmingham
In 1987, I took Matthew to supper in a restaurant in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad. We were both there for the cricket where England lost the series 5-0. Matthew was covering for The Guardian and I was guarding my two authors - Simon Barnes who was writing Phil Edmonds biog called A Singular Man and Phil's wife, Frances Edmonds, who was writing what was to become a giant best seller: Another Bloody Tour a play on Frank Keating's book Another Bloody Day in Paradise.
Anyway, our taxi driver said the restaurant we were going to was a humdinger though traffic there was slight. We settled into a beer or two and ordered something local. A mouthful or two later and Matthew inquired:
"Could you tell me what exactly we are eating?"
"It's wild guinea pig" came the reply.
"Guinea pig" retorted Matthew "well I can't eat that I'm Jewish."