They say you should never revisit the past, but there we were standing on the little red-brick bridge above the rushing River Rye. Old friends, the four of us had returned to the country house of our student days. The first view wasn’t good: the stately sycamores that once shaded our many parties lay freshly toppled; the labyrinthine shrubbery had been snuffed out. The old glory seemed further departed when the owner kindly showed us into the eighteenth-century parsonage.