We came down finally on Saturday evening. It had been a bad term, or at least the wrong end of a good one – fantastically quick and hurried and rushing into a positive frenzy in the last few days. Chain-smoking, rushing from meeting to meeting, wishing people to whom I felt utterly indifferent “a good vac”. Tails sometimes and then the comfort and relief of putting on really frowsty tweeds again. Guests to breakfast, a spate of inconsequential little parties and a consistent horror at the number of times one seemed to be undressing for bed in those last fumbled days. Then packing, aghast at the quantity of paper and print one can accumulate in eight short weeks. A tawdry dusty incoherent fag-end of time: thousands of people packed flat like kippers into a small oblong dance hall. And then, suddenly, into the cleanliness and empty beauty of the Cotswolds in snow.

Diana and I spent Saturday night in a basement flat outside Oxford. An old friend gave me a key and had a fire lit. When we got there the ceiling was jumping with deep light and the saggy divan filled the carpet space. There was a lonely note from John and we washed in the kitchen, our feet frozen on the tiles and our stupid silk pyjamas flapping dolefully against them. But Diana looked nice with her corn hair spread like a fan on the cushions, and we seemed soon to engender enough heat for our comfort.

We got up finally at some scandalous hour in the middle of the morning, and then more cold tiles on the soles of our feet, with a tired fire blowsy with ashes and the rain scampering on the railings outside. But the grey stones of the Cotswolds had been in our minds for weeks, so we decided to go on as soon as we had broken down certain “sensible” tendencies to return to London and walk later – knowing that it just never happens. You must take your bull by the horns when he appears, which – Lord knows – is seldom enough – even if he is wet.

So we hid the key carefully behind the books on the mantleshelf and packed our ridiculous little rucksacks; then, clearly – breakfast.

We were replete with sleep and love, but our bellies were void and desperate, and it was grand to know that a very good and cheap cyclists’ doss existed just over the road. There we had bacon and eggs and a comforting number of cups of coffee and shared about the stupidest Sunday paper we had ever seen. I had only the vaguest ideas about the Cotswolds and what we were to do there; but we had four pounds left of the sole proceeds of my first book of poems out of the five, and we were determined to spread it over the greatest possible number of days in Gloucestershire.