The tastes of summer

England. On a glorious summer afternoon in the Sussex countryside, I had been invited to watch polo at Cowdray Park, the game’s equivalent of Lord’s. A beautiful lawn, overlooked by the ruins of a great Elizabethan house burnt down in the 1790s; a sky with gentle, Constable clouds; classically English trees — this is Glyndebourne with ponies instead of music. There is a gracious, aesthetic harmony between rider and pony. As Churchill put it, ‘the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man’. Equally, a pretty girl rarely looks more handsome than when mounted in the saddle.

That is the easy bit. The first point that always strikes me about the game is the combination of beauty and danger. During the match, everything moves extraordinarily fast. Even though the umpires are fully alert to prevent collisions, it is surprising that there are not more casualties. From the other end of the aesthetic scale, I was reminded of motorised rickshaws in Delhi. A clamourous mob of them converge. Fortunately, they do not go as fast as polo ponies. Even so, it seems impossible to avoid a pile-up. You close your eyes, brace yourself, yet somehow, no one has crashed.

I was the guest of Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, the Hungarian ambassador, a delightful fellow often saluted in this magazine (an admiration which he reciprocates). Although this was not a solemn occasion, our talk strayed into history, and contrasts. We were not far from the Channel, which explains so much about the gentleness of English history. That great invasion-defying moat has made places like Cowdray possible. Compare Hungary, with no equivalent defence against cavalry or tanks. Much of human history is a cry of pain. After the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, which brought an end to the Hungarian medieval monarchy, and the ensuing Ottoman conquest, Hungary’s cries were especially plangent.