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The early Victorians codified so many aspects of British life that it is easy to forget the brisk, authenticating stamp they brought to the idea of leaving your hearth for a fortnight's absentee leisure. Yet the evidence lies strewn all over the cultural landscapes of the 1840s and 1850s, runs through the fiction of the period like the lettering through a stick of rock, and very soon sets up home in the hitherto untilled field of middle-brow art. W P Frith's Life at the Seaside, also known as \"Ramsgate Sands\", a sensation at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1854 and eventually bought by Queen Victoria, is always supposed to be the first realistic study of an extended group of middle-class British people, and it is significant that the thing that brings them together is the holiday. Fifty-two years ago next month the novelist Simon Raven filed some particularly caustic reportage to The Spectator from what looks very like his home town of Deal, Kent. This \"respectable resort\" is now a magnet for \"tight-faced and genteel couples in their early thirties who are doing rather well out of the affluent society\", who \"sit for hours in their parked Austins on the finest day\" and \"putt without interest on the municipal putting green\". So why are they there? Eavesdropping in a beach-side cafe, Raven suspects that the goad is social - or rather familial - pressure (\"You know bloody well why we came. Because your bloody mother wouldn't let me rest until I'd arranged what she calls a proper holiday for you.\") The citizens of a mass society must be where others are, Raven breezily concludes, or else the world might end and they not know of it, and the citizens of an affluent society must have somewhere they can show off their careful acquisitions ... All this confirms another suspicion about the modern holiday. This is that, with certain exceptions, the average holidaymaker doesn't want adventure, or excitement, or even a change of scene. He, or she, really only wants a slightly more glamorous version of what is already to hand. One of the most depressing moments I ever experienced on a holiday came while sitting in a Sri Lankan hotel room and listening to a rich Milwaukee accent inform \"Mom\" that the coach was waiting while Mom hollered back that she couldn't get any hot water. On the other hand, I spend holidays in dogged search of a newspaper and am just as bad. Meanwhile, here in Elveden, as the sun rises in the sky, everyone is no doubt getting exactly what they came for. Frith, were he able to find space for his penny farthing in the cycle racks, would be setting up his easel on the spot.

A gambler, flneur, cricketer, controversialist, imbiber and fine host, he revelled in pushing his restaurant bills to astonishing levels. Of gambling, he cheerfully described \"the almost sexual satisfaction which comes from an evening of steady and disastrous losses\". Passionate yet aloof, dissipated yet energetic, [Simon Raven] represents the perfect paradox of a certain type of Englishness. After obeying his publisher's restraining order for 34 years, he returned to London and died in an almshouse for the impoverished, regretting nothing. He wrote his own epitaph: \"He shared his bottle, and when still young and appetising, his bed.\" Beware the man who boasts he was a friend.

The question of his \"gentlemanliness\" returns us to a problem that has been puzzling social commentators for the best part of part of half a millennium. What is a gentleman? Can you become one, or is its essence breathed over your cradle? Is it a mark of rank or merely status? The original definition is not overly helpful as the \"gentle\" part, from the Latin gentilis, has nothing to do with mildness or suavity but here means \"worthy or typical of a kind\", ie \"genus\". That Lady Mary eventually gets her way didn't detach this question from the Victorian equivalent of the online discussion forum: in some ways it only confirmed its imponderability. If, as it now seemed, a man's status was defined by his profession, then who was to decide whether that profession was sufficiently high-powered to allow its representatives to be considered as gentlemen? The Victorian journalist was often uncomfortably aware that what he did for a living was not truly respectable, liable to be written off as \"penny-a-lining\". That these attitudes softened over time is confirmed by a rather awful moment in Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, written half a century later, in which our Old Etonian hero, queueing up to spend the night in a casual ward with a motley collection of vagrants, gives his trade as \"journalist\". Immediately he is singled out by the official in charge, the Tramp Major, who demands of him: \"Then you are a gentleman?\" Orwell replies that he supposes he is. \"Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor\", the Tramp Major consoles him, \"bloody bad luck that is\", thereby confirming another aspect of gentility's mystique, which is that ordinary people seem rather to like identifying and responding to it, as in the \"You're a gent\" acknowledgment of some minor courtesy, which persists to this day. At the same time Orwell's gentlemanliness, to which all reports of him attest, was patently to do with his manner: the tweed suit which, however battered, had clearly been made by a very good tailor, that indefinable self-possession which invariably encouraged pub landlords to call him \"sir\" while addressing other people at the table by their Christian names.

[SIMON RAVEN] is an author better known for his life than his writings. The author of many novels - including the Alms for Oblivion cycle - plus numerous works of non-fiction and an impressive set of television screenplays retains our curiosity primarily because he was an intellectual Terry-Thomas. What is delightful about Raven's various reminiscences collected in this book is that they are delivered without rancour or squealing. The author was well aware of his weaknesses, and revelled in them at the same time as suffering from acute guilt at his failure to at least act like a gent. The other great distinguishing mark of Raven's prose is the wonderful chasm which opens up between his often exquisitely rendered prose and the scurrilous antics it is harnessed to describe.

[SIMON RAVEN] is an author better known for his life than his writings. The author of many novels - including the Alms for Oblivion cycle - plus numerous works of non-fiction and an impressive set of television screenplays retains our curiosity primarily because he was an intellectual Terry-Thomas. What is delightful about Raven's various reminiscences collected in this book is that they are delivered without rancour or squealing. The author was well aware of his weaknesses, and revelled in them at the same time as suffering from acute guilt at his failure to at least act like a gent. The other great distinguishing mark of Raven's prose is the wonderful chasm which opens up between his often exquisitely rendered prose and the scurrilous antics it is harnessed to describe.

WHILE OTHER SCHOOLS scrabble around for pitches upon which to play cricket, Eton and Harrow are in the habit of playing their annual contest at Lord's. This tradition is so long entrenched - no fixture has a longer history at Lord's - that it has become an immutable part of the cricket calendar. The only threat to it being the election of a socialist government. This particular spectator had been attracted not only by the chance to watch FPP McN Boyd open the Eton bowling and England of Eton (what an impressive name to have on your card - England: Eton, Oxon, The Bar. Says it all, really) open the batting but in the hope of watching Denis Compton's grandson bat for Harrow. An 18-year-old South African, he will play for Middlesex seconds when school's out, where he will join Len Hutton's grandson Ben. In his Times obituary, [Simon Raven] was described as being the best cricket writer of the last century and in Shadows on the Grass ('the filthiest book I have read' said EW Swanton) he proves the point. There are wonderful accounts of matches played all around the world, of Peter May batting, of William Rees Mogg - how times change - being lauded for his wisdom and foresight. Even more surprising is that the unlikely hero of the book is Jim Prior. It is he who reminds Raven that cricket is a sentimental game and anyone who plays or loves it is not without sentiment.