Perhaps Wales will be better.

We have reached the 'reasons to be cheerful' stage of self administered therapy, a dubious variant of the idea that positive thinking or CBT is actually going to help, a bit like giving someone having a heart attack a sticking plaster. Still, just because putting on a brave face is not going to improve things one iota does not discourage us from doing it anyway, because we're English and that's what we do. So, reasons to be cheerful, each one with a suitably downbeat caveat...

1. It was my 66th birthday last week and the pain of becoming officially an OAP ameliorated somewhat by being given the biggest pay rise I have ever received for doing nothing at all apart from ageing. 

Sadly, the improvement in my financial circumstances is a meagre compensation compared to the loss of earnings experienced since accepting redundancy in 2013. In fact I reckon it would take until 2054 to make-up the shortfall by which time I will be 99, or more likely long dead and forgotten.

2. That being said, we made the most of our unexpected early retirement, becoming experts in maximum travel at minimum cost.

However our freedom to wander freely around Europe in the future has been greatly curtailed by a boneheaded slim majority of my fellow countrymen. Yes, I am a remoaner fundamentalist and I will keep going on about it all the time simply to irritate the boneheads, especially the nearby caravanner who has chosen to adorn their ridiculous SUV and twin-axled prefab's number plates with 'ENG' and a St. George's flag.  So there!

3. Spring! Whatever the madness  happening in the human zoo, who cannot be fail to be uplifted by the arrival of longer days, blossoming hedgerows and the dawn chorus? 

It's true, these things have been a solace during the latter days of lockdown. However, it has been a particularly tardy spring, snow showers in late April, frosty mornings well into May. 

I have spent weeks building a veg plot. I wonder now if there was any point to it given how short the growing season is in Buxton, I suspect that most of the veg won't mature until late August, by which time, with luck we we will be speeding southwards and the only beneficiaries will be the local wildlife.

4. It's great not to have to stay local, even if our particular locality is not so bad.

True, somewhere else is always a blessing. What I really want to do is not merely escape the locality, I want to go abroad, no, I need to go abroad for the sake of my wellbeing and sanity. What my home country has become makes me alternatively sad then mad. In fact, I really am confused about where exactly my home country now is. My passport says I'm British, but we cannot really pretend to be a United Kingdom any more. Collectively we appear to have achieved the opposite of Jo Cox's optimistic assertion that "“We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.” Right now, three out of four of Britain's constituent nations seem fatefully seduced by nationalisms of one kind or another,  English exceptionalism from Westminster, Scottish independence from Holyrood, and in Stormont the truce between warring tribes maintained for the past two decades seems ever more fragile. 

Our conclusion, perhaps Wales will be better, it is after all the last refuge of British socialism, the red wall holds for the moment. It is a different country, an abroad at home, it could be Scandinavia where the language is bewildering, but the locals are friendly and speak English. So here we are, in Kingsbridge Campsite near Beaumaris. 

The evening is chilly but the light beautiful, there in the distance Snowdonia across the Menai Straight; immediately in front of us the hedgerows are three weeks closer to summer than ours at home, herb Robert, red campion and hedge parsley in flower, the cowslips fading. 

We walk up the lane past a row of swanky architect designed houses, each of them someone's retirement dream, I suspect. From the glass gabled upper storey the view across the narrow straights towards the mountains must be a lovely thing to wake up to, a sublime backdrop to the more bucolic scene in the foreground - a patchwork of viridian fields dotted with whitewashed cottages, like Morbihan on steroids we observed. 

Could we have done this? Perhaps, but what brings me joy is having a different view each day, I cannot imagine being rooted to one spot, no matter how idyllic. I am a discontented soul, so seeking peace is a pointless exercise because I am hardwired to live in doubt. 

For many people it seems beauty is conflated with tranquility, 'the still point of the turning world', the 'peace that passeth understand'. It took me half a lifetime to realise I am happy simply figuring stuff out, it is curiosity that makes me tick and there is profound beauty in flux too. Phrases from Plath's 'Ariel' spill through my head. I muse that this way of thinking is not without risk; you only need to read 'Edge' to see that.