I visited a friend in Cornwall this weekend. He's a retired fireman (retired out of the service with an injury) and has chosen a to settle down in the West Country with his wife and their daughter. They're wonderful people, they have an enormous, rambling old house and acres of land, they're generous, fun loving and enjoy having their friends around them. So we came from all over and set up camp on their lawn.

It was a moving feast. Some people arrived earlier in the week, (I arrived on Friday and left on Sunday), others stayed for much longer and a quite a few of the local villagers came out for the evenings, many of them are the parents of his daughter who has made lots of new friends in school.

Most people would be content to simply let it roll, but our hosts had really gone to town, They'd hired a trampoline (for the kids), a swimming pool, porta loos and outside showers, and a marquee where whoever was there enjoyed breakfasts when they emerged in the morning - and long boozy dinners that went on until the early hours each day.

We fished, rode on Dartmoor, body boarded in huge waves and pouring rain (did you know that Mako sharks have been spotted off the coast?!!), bbq'd, got drunk, talked rubbish, made new friends and generally chilled out until our bottoms dropped off. The children played until they dropped, and everybody chipped in with the chores, nobody threw even the remotest of peeves.

I came home on the bike, (there's plenty of time to think on a motorbike) and I was wondering, if I had what they'd managed to create, an idyll in the countryside, whether I would be so generous with it.