Meanwhile, British travellers have been lumbering around for decades on what the French call "classic" trains (John could probably suggest a different word). The last link, east to Strasbourg, is being built ?rande vitesse.Across the Rhine, Germany is racing to trump the French, while Amsterdam is soon to be linked to the Continent's high-velocity network Italy and Spain, too, are speeding ahead. The first Train ?rande Vitesse departed from the Gare de Lyon in Paris in 1981. The tentacles of Europe's finest high-speed network have since spread across France. It doesn't exactly melt into the landscape, but it is, as the French would say, sympathique.The French could say quite a lot about the way the nation that pioneered the railway has, at least in a token way, finally caught up with the rest of the Continent. Yet unlike the sordid six-lane stripe of concrete that rumbles across Kent from London to the Channel, the new line carves a slender, delicate course.

Hitherto-untouched countryside this is not: the link largely follows the course desecrated 20 years ago by the M20 motorway, which hums constantly and disharmoniously at anyone walking the line of the railway line. The twin tracks rest upon mattresses of ballast, cradled in concrete and guarded by catenaries that carry the overhead power lines. The link zips through Kent, a county laced with communications links ever since the Romans built Watling Street between Dover and London, nearly two millennia ago.The new line follows a more southerly trajectory, beneath the lip of the North Downs, but it hardly amounts to an act of vandalism perpetrated upon the Garden of England. As a civil engineering achievement, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is not quite on a par with the Pyramids or the Panama Canal, but it genuinely looks good on Kent. The Victorian engineers would be amazed that the railways they built to carry commuters in one direction, and hop-pickers in the other, are being used to bear trains capable of travelling at 186mph.At last, the lamentable reputation that Britain's railways have acquired may begin to wane.

Trainspotters' notebooks will be bereft of locomotive numbers, while those on board will miss out on millennia of history. Yet Kent will also gain an attraction, a strangely beautiful scar.Looking at the railway network, you might conclude that the one English county that does not need an extra rail link is Kent But the tangle of lines is strictly 19th century. From tomorrow morning, the highest speed at which passenger trains run in this country will increase by 50 per cent - and Britain will become a blur.Brief encounter? It will be for passengers on Eurostar trains to Brussels, Paris and beyond, who will waste barely a quarter-hour covering the 46-mile link between Fawkham Junction, near Gravesend, and the mouth of the Channel Tunnel. Perhaps he has spent too long commuting on the London to Brighton line, completed 162 years ago this week, and on which even the fastest expresses average no more than 60mph. So my mission, this implausibly sunny day in late September, was to write about what they will be missing by travelling too fast. "The day that a train in Britain goes too fast will be the day that Hell freezes over," retorted John, and changed the subject from eastern Kent to western India. At the promised top speed of 186mph, I explained, the exquisite detail of the North Downs and the valley of the Great Stour will elude those on board. Stage one of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link carries its first fare-paying passengers through east Kent tomorrow.

I was pretending to work, too: rambling beside the first significant new railway line to be built in Britain for a century. My friend John was at his desk, pretending to work, when he called me to discuss his forthcoming trip to Rajasthan "Where are you?" he asked. At any time of year, you can organise wine-tastings or visit a wine cellar. The biggest weinfest takes place over the first weekend of September in Bernkastel-Kues, where locals knock back gallons of their favourite tipple, Bernkasteler Doctor. Two varieties are highly prized: St Nicholaswein and Christwein which have their grapes picked on St Nicholas's day and Christmas Day respectively.The region hosts numerous wine festivals between June and October. It is made with very ripe grapes, which, as the name suggests, are pressed while frozen in order to obtain the most concentrated juice.