Clean Country at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

In the search for thrift even the strenuous "economist" will rarely wish ' to seek out hotels below those of second-class rating, for Greece is not another Switzerland in this regard. (The new Estia Emboron, a third-class hotel of Athens may be an exception, since lean-of-purse student groups often put up here.) Greece is a clean country, let me emphasize, and the Greeks are a clean race. Enter any humble home that is "unrehearsed" for your visit, in some small hamlet of the mainland or some island, and the chances are much better than even that you will find it meticulously clean and pridefully kept.

Simple units in fresh white are teamed with stripped, painted floorboards to make a clean, blank canvas. Added to this are lots of pretty country-style accessories, which add interest and colour.

Sussex is another pastoral showpiece. This is more stalwart country, washed by the English Channel and celebrated by poets of virile inclination—Chesterton, Kipling, and Belloc. The fine chalk hills called the Sussex Downs, which sprawl across the county from east to west, are speckled with wild orchid and blue rampion. Gusty sea winds scour them from the south, and choice country houses of all sizes and shapes abound. Although in its northern reaches it degenerates into suburban gentility, Sussex still retains, by and large, a wide open, clean, and tree-clumped spaciousness.