This is about a friend of mine. Christopher was born into a high-flying, English establishment family: his father was a distinguished university professor, his sister has made an eminent career for herself in publishing, one of his brothers is a highly-successful art dealer and the other has soared through the ranks of the City of London to become a rather well-known government advisor.

But Christopher doesn't quite fit this mould, and probably never did. He looks the part - to see him in the street, or on TV, you would think him an archetypal English gentleman; probably the squire of broad acres in the Shires, or perhaps a stalwart of the clubs of St James's. You could easily imagine Christopher leading his men into battle at Ypres, The Somme... Spion Kop, Waterloo, Blenheim... or even Agincourt.

Agincourt works, because one of Christopher's many passionate interests is archery. In the garden of his small farm in Kent is a workshop crammed with lathes and un-named machines for the manufacture of arrows. One wall is covered with racks containing arrows fletched with goose feathers, duck feathers, parchment and paper... Christopher can tell you exactly what their relative merits are, and will demonstrate in a nearby field at the slightest show of curiosity.

When my Czech wife and I got married 11 years ago, Christopher's present was a bow for each of us, made by hand to a pattern which was hallowed by time in 1400 and has not changed since. Not only are they beautiful objects, but they can send a one-metre arrow 200 metres, accurately and powerfully enough to split a wooden post in two.

Christopher is a fanatical believer in sustainability. He is 'Green' incarnate. But instead of just talking about it - which, by the way, he does at length, anywhere and everywhere - he has spent the last 20 years turning his farm in Kent into a medieval replica; no modern fertilisers have been used, and all traces of 20th Century additives have been tirelessly expunged; the fields have been, for 20 years, ploughed and seeded by hand, as if the internal combustion engine and the agro-chemical industry had never existed. The result is a mosaic of meadows and streams smothered in wild flowers and plants... a delight to the eye, and a tableau of what England probably looked like before the Industrial Revolution.

In Christopher's house you find evidence of other passions... dozens of Victorian and Edwardian leather boxes, all old and battered, all in use. There are binoculars, telescopes, compasses, walking sticks and ancient tools whose purpose is unguessable. His walls are covered with shelves bearing leather-bound tomes, all old and scruffy, all read at least once. You are likely to trip over a sleeping dog on your way from the drawing-room to the kitchen - there seem to be many of them. Or it might be a lamb; they appear in Spring in huge numbers, and appear to have carte blanche to go where they wish.

Christopher is also an accomplished psychotherapist, an expert maintainer of woodlands, a man who can tell you the best restaurant almost anywhere in the world - because he's been there, and tried them all; a hedonist to his fingertips, a contrarian thinker and an excellent artist. He is left-handed.

In his eccentricity, he might be thought typically English. Yet in the force of his interests he is far from the typical English model, and raises eyebrows because of it. He doesn't care; he is impelled by his lifelong devotion to his idealistic vision of the countryside, and whatever happens to catch his eye receives the same obsessive commitment - be it archery, battlefields, politics, music, books, ideas or people.

I hesitate to say that Christopher leads his life on a higher plane than most people in our native land, but I think he does. I am very glad to know him, and I hope he's not the only one of his kind.