Driving around Oxfordshire churches at the weekend, I sympathised with Prince Philip, and his dangerous driving, for the first time. In the late afternoon, a low, raking sun turned roads into dazzling beams of light, almost impossible to see into. What made it worse – although infinitely more beautiful – was the snow. Fields became great white seas. The snow flattened contours, making the roadscape even harder to read. And, when the sunlight bounced off the twin, tyre-made tracks of ice ahead, it was perilous work inching along the B-roads. But oh how lovely the churches looked. We get just the right amount of snow in England; enough for it to be enchanting every time it falls. Presumably Eskimos get pretty tired of the stuff. My favourite church was St Mary’s, Swinbrook, with its snow-capped bale tombs – named after their semi-cylindrical tops, inspired by the wool bales that made this part of the world so rich in the Middle Ages. Among the tombstones was that of Unity Mitford, who died aged 33 in 1948, having shot herself in the English Garden in Munich 1939 at the outbreak of war. Her epitaph reads, “Say not the struggle naught availeth.” I hoped the Arthur Hugh Clough line echoed her Christian struggle, rather than the Nazi Mitford’s fanatical devotion to the Führer.