One of the clichés about the Isle of Wight is that it is England in microcosm, a miniaturised Olde England confined to another much smaller island that you can traverse in under an hour. Despite its proximity to the mainland – ferries from Southampton take around forty-five minutes – the island has long had an ambiguous status. It was only officially ceded to England by France in the thirteenth century, and until the 1990s, it had a governor, like a colonial or overseas territory.

My father’s mother and her sisters were among the Londoners who decamped to the island in the post-war years. When my family visited them in the decades that followed, the feeling of time having stopped and gone backwards was palpable. In 1950, the writer and painter Barbara Jones described the island as a series of medieval villages so pickled in the nineteenth century that they were effectively Victorian. I’ve visited at least every summer since 2018, and though it has diversified and loosened up a little, the island can still feel like a place where the nineteenth century never quite ended, a Victorian summer utopia perpetually falling into dereliction and desuetude, its eroding cliffs permanently threatening to plunge the seaside resorts below into the sea.

‘Micro’ is a frequent prefix on the island. There is a model village at Godshill, and a miniature village of small thatched houses in the town of Shanklin. This microcosmic quality inspired Julian Barnes’s England, England, a laboured satire on John Major’s nostalgic late-Thatcherite era, in which a malevolent Murdochian media corporation purchases and transforms the island into a theme park microcosm of the mainland, geared towards American tourists disappointed at the depressing reality of actually existing England. One of the corporation’s blue-sky thinkers summarises the island’s ‘offer’ to his boss as follows:

‘What’s it got we can use? A little bit of everything, I’d say, yet at the same time nothing too mega. Nothing we can’t dispense with if need be. So. One castle, rather nice: ramparts, gatehouse, keep, chapel. No moat, but we could bung one in easily enough. Next, one royal palace: Osborne House, as noted by Dr Max. Italianate. Opinions differ. Two resident monarchs: Charles the first, in captivity at the said castle before his execution; Queen Victoria, in residence at the said palace, where she died. Feature possibilities in either, I’d say. One resident famous poet: Tennyson . . . Many thatched cottages, perfect for tea-shops. Correction: most of which already are tea-shops, but suitable for upgrade . . .’

‘Fill it in!’ chortled Sir Jack. ‘Concrete it over!’