England. Despite being a Scotsman, partly brought up in Ulster, I have taken so much Englishness for granted over so many years. So do most Englishmen, to at least as great an extent as the inhabitants of any other major country. But I hope that I am just enough of a historian to enquire about this for-grantedness, and to wonder how it happened.

I had chosen a good place to ruminate. We were sitting in the garden of the Mayfly pub near Stockbridge in Hampshire, watching the river Test glide by almost saucily. I have occasionally tried – and failed – to catch a trout on such a chalk stream, and have indeed been given sceptical instructions on the subject by Jeremy Paxman: sceptical because he was certain that my heavy footfall would always frustrate my efforts. ‘Fear not,’ said the gentle, saucily-taunting Test. ‘Although our fish-maidens may be safe, you can always enjoy the sun and a jolly good pint of beer.’ So I did.

Trotskyism was my next thought. Just over 50 years ago, I was a sort of Trotskyite and can still shudder with embarrassment at the thought of such adolescent naivety. But not all Trotskyites were irredeemably evil. Among their number was an unacknowledged benefactor of the modern British male: Roger Protz, who was instrumental in the Campaign for Real Ale. I shudder to think how much gaseous garbage I once drank that masqueraded as beer. Camra put that right.

Throughout the UK, it is now easy to drink real beer, and the pints of Fullers I drank at the Mayfly hit the spot, though there is also a mystery. I deliberately mentioned a benefaction to the male race and at this point the palates divide. I know girls who would yield to no man in their appreciation of good wine and who might well end the evening with some Armagnac and a Havana. But they do not enjoy bitter. De gustibus…

Perhaps we need another campaign, for real butchers’ shops. Over the years, they have lost ground to the supermarkets. But Stockbridge has one, Robinson’s. All Peter Robinson’s meat is outstanding, and people drive for miles to stock up. It would probably be wrong to use the word ‘sublime’ to describe those comestibles. That is not what they are about. Platonic ideal is a more permissive concept. Robinson’s exemplifies the Platonic ideal of the English pork sausage.

That brings us back to Englishness. Platonism never flourished on these shores, along with any other form of idealism, political or metaphysical. This leads us to that quintessential Englishman, Dr Johnson. He was once asked how he would reply to Bishop Berkeley and his idealist disciples. A stone lay in his path. He delivered it an almighty kick. ‘I refute him thus, Sir.’

At the risk of sounding philistine, I have often been tempted to conclude that there are two forms of philosophy. One deals with the meaning of life, and the questions are unanswerable. The second deals with the meaning of meaning, which can descend into the aridities of Oxford philosophy in the 1950s. The clarity of Dr Johnson’s boot is worth more than the content of many philosophical libraries.

We had still not solved the English question. The Channel, the Church of England – if only it could recover its self-confidence – pork sausages, English bitter, a distaste for philosophical abstraction, a naturally conservative disposition and above all, the monarchy, that golden thread in our history: that was enough for the present.

Moreover, it was time to move from beer to lunchtime. Leg of lamb, accompanied by Château Senejac ’16, a sound cru bourgeois, and after all Gascony used to belong to the English Crown. God save the King.