A green and pleasant land

The author on high rollers in Macau and the joys of an English summer

SUMMER HAS ARRIVED. The fields near my house in Oxfordshire are full of longhorn cattle. At dawn they stand ankle-deep in river mist, the pink sky above them. In the stillness I can hear them chewing the grass. The beauty is incomprehensible – so many shades of green. There’s sap green, cobalt green, viridian green, green gold, oxide of chromium. I know these colours because my neighbour is an artist and I often find him standing in the fields, surrounded by inquisitive longhorns, painting the trees. In the evenings I walk to a nearby wood, as buzzards circle their nests, sounding ethereal cries.

RECENTLY, I WENT to visit my Hong Kong relatives. We all convened in Macau, as they often go there at weekends. When I first went to Macau in the 1990s, it was still relatively low-rise, with cobbled streets and Portugueseera houses. On that occasion, we had dinner in a family-run fish restaurant by the shore, then played baccarat in a ramshackle casino, where the bets were the equivalent of a few pounds and elderly women handed round marmalade sandwiches. Two decades on, the fish restaurant has been demolished and everything in Macau is gigantic – the skyscrapers, the roads, the hotels, the casinos and the empty spaces awaiting development.

We stayed in a gigantic hotel, which was a copy of The Venetian in Las Vegas, itself a copy of, well, Venice. Everything in the hotel was fake, including a replica of the Grand Canal, complete with a fake sky. I followed my relatives down one corridor after another. My uncle, who used to serve in the Hong Kong police force, pointed out the card sharps. He can identify malign types by gestures and attitudes I fail to notice. In the highstakes casino, crowds were playing baccarat once again, but this time the minimum bet was $3,000 and there was not a marmalade sandwich in sight. One man lost half a million dollars, then calmly left the table, as if this was quite usual.

I ENDED UP coming back from Macau via Paris, and then on to Hay-on-wye for Howthelightgetsin, the world’s biggest philosophy festival. The site is by the river, and you can sit in a tent listening to Michael Howard, Anna Soubry and Jon Lansman on contemporary politics, or Helen Lederer, Susan Neiman and Janne Teller on the meaning of life, as people surge past in canoes. I spoke on a few themes, including whether the self is an illusion (no, in my opinion) and if we can discuss serious ideas using comedy (yes, definitely). The audiences were hugely well informed, lively and broad-minded. In another debate that I chaired, we fell into a discussion of reality – an illusion according to cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, with counter-arguments from philosophers Hilary Lawson and Maria Baghramian. A question emerged: if a herd of wildebeest crashed into the tent, would they also be an illusion? ‘Yes,’ said Donald Hoffman in his charming, thoughtful manner. ‘But I’d get out of their way nonetheless.’ This seems a very pragmatic approach to anti-realism.

NOW I’M HOME AGAIN, where the summer is so lovely, fragile and fleeting, like an enormous yes. Nature is burgeoning wildly, blackbirds are trilling on a stable roof. Soon I’ll go with my family to the Lake District, where we’ll swim in Coniston. The temperature is seriously glacial, but it’s wonderful to swim out to the centre of the lake and see Grizedale Forest reflected in the crystalline water. More greens.

Zed, by Joanna Kavenna, is out on Thursday (Faber, £16.99)

In the casino, one man lost half a million dollars, then calmly left the table, as if it was quite usual