Did Vaughan Williams ever take to the open road, Gypsy-fashion? Did a friend ever make him the kind of offer a famous character in Kenneth Grahame makes two of his friends?

The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908, and it's clear that with the caravan phase of Mr Toad's enthusiasms—it comes between his river-boat and motor-car phases—Grahame is making very gentle fun of a cult which by then was in full swing. ‘Gypsophilia’ one might call it (creating an abstract noun from the adjective ‘gypsophile’ that was current among members of the Gypsy Lore Society in the first half of the twentieth century): the late Victorian and Edwardian idealisation and rather selective emulation of the life of the Gypsy Traveller, one element in the age's particular penchant for rural places, spaces and faces. Grahame has Mr Toad borrow the Gypsophile language of the kind of turn-of-the-century romance that featured thrilling, touching, inspiring encounters between picturesque Gypsies—’full-’, ‘pure-’ and ‘true-blooded’ ones if at all possible—and gentile folk (‘Gorgios’ in Romany).