Graham Boynton

On the Bussel Highway, an immaculate ribbon of tarmac that takes you south of Perth, the vegetation changes dramatically in a matter of miles. Suddenly, around the town of Busselton, which is 130 miles from Perth, instead of the rough, hardscrabble soils that form the bedrock of Australia’s desert environment, you find yourself in a more Mediterranean ecosystem. A further 40 miles south and you’re in Margaret River, an eco-warrior’s dream location with carbon-neutral residents – artists, chefs, surfers, organic farmers, winemakers – all over the place, neat, well-tended countryside, and the crispest, cleanest air you can breathe on this planet. Sea breezes from the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean wash over this forested landscape like an air-conditioning system.

My friend Allan Lamb calls me a ‘cricket tragic’, a back-handed compliment from a former English international cricketer. So the prospect of flying out to Australia and watching the first Ashes Test in Perth was too seductive to ignore. I knew pretty early on that the cost was going to be exorbitant. A gruelling 24-hour flight – and therefore serious jet lag – meant that either a premium economy or a business-class airfare was necessary. But as this was a bucket-list moment I indulged in the latter. Then hotel prices during an Ashes Test were inevitably ramped up and six nights at an ordinary inner-city hotel ended up costing twice as much as the norm.

Earlier this month, the best rock band to have come out of America in decades played London’s Roundhouse in front of 3,000 very excited British fans, all of whom sang along to every song the Alabamans played. It was the best gig I’ve been to in years, mainly because the Red Clay Strays are musically so damned good and that smart British audience got everything they were offering. It had that rowdy, joyful atmosphere that Faces gigs did in the early 1970s. Stay with me, Spectator readers.

I was surprised at the strong smell of marijuana smoke that wafted across Lord’s during the West Indies test match last week. Although there were occasional, passing whiffs throughout the ground, it was in the Coronation Gardens, where the psychedelically blazered MCC members and their friends meet for epic piss-ups, that distinct gusts of weed smoke were most evident. I cannot think of a more law-abiding community than cricket lovers The drug of choice for members is traditionally something from Reims or Burgundy. The new generation and their friends are clearly looking more to Jamaica, Afghanistan and rural Sussex for their selection of inebriant.

Over five decades, I have been lucky enough to witness some of the great rock concerts of our time. Bob Dylan at Blackbushe in the late 1970s, The Everly Brothers Reunion Concert at the Albert Hall in the early 1980s, The Rolling Stones at New York’s Shea Stadium in the 1990s and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Paris a few years after that.  If that sounds overheated and inappropriately ecstatic I refuse to apologise There are many others but those are the first to light up my memory bank. Now add Taylor Swift’s Eras concerts at Wembley stadium to that list. Three nights last weekend and another five nights to come in August, this is one of the great events in modern popular music.

I’ve had many encounters with Sir Richard Branson over the 40 years since he launched Virgin Atlantic, the smart, stylish British airline that arguably should be this country’s premier national flag carrier. (As it happens, a Spanish-registered airline called British Airways is the dubious claimant to that status.)  The oddest and most revealing meeting took place in 1996 around the time he was planning to re-enter the music market. Five years earlier, Branson had sold Virgin Records to EMI for £550 million. I was living in New York and was looking for financial backing for a musical I’d helped create. I called Branson in London, expecting to be fobbed off. Instead, he told me he was coming to New York imminently and that we should discuss the project over breakfast.

I travel to the African bush frequently, at least once a year. It takes my mind of British politics. The trips often involves watching predators hunting down their prey and then tearing the poor animals limb from limb. Red in tooth and claw, the African bushveld reminds me of the fragility and brevity of life and the ever-presence of death. My insignificant place on the planet was thus confirmed A week ago I was in the Botswana’s Okavango Delta, at the safari operator Natural Selection’s new North Island camp, when I suddenly found myself confronting my own mortality. I had gone to bed early after a pleasant meal in the camp’s mess with several fellow guests, including two eminent Americans, a wealthy New York investment banker and a prominent Miami medical professor.

The presence of ‘The Hat’ has already raised disputes within my family. My wife refuses to walk with me in our village, which I think is unreasonable. ‘Well, would you walk around with me if I were wearing a witch’s hat?’ she said. I know what she means, but she’s wrong. This is not fancy dress; it is a statement of style and taste and should be as acceptable as wearing a pair of Australian R.M. Williams boots or South African veldskoens. Could I wear it at Lord’s this summer? Daughter Two thinks the MCC would be tempted to withdraw my membership Last week, in a Texan town called Bryan (I know, very Monty Python), I had a custom cowboy hat made for me.

I am writing this from Nashville, Tennessee, where British Airways was supposed to have flown me and a planeload of Boeing 787 customers on a direct service from Heathrow. However, the night before our intended departure I received a terse message from the airline saying that the flight had been cancelled. A later email informed me that I would be flying on their code-share partner American Airlines (AA) to Charlotte, North Carolina. Then after a layover I would eventually be deposited at my destination. There is mounting frustration at what they say is BA’s ‘unreliability and general low standards’ Not surprisingly the American Airlines flight was rammed with passengers, many similarly bumped BA customers.