On grass snakes

Minzhi sends me this from Diana Athill's autobiography, "Instead of a Letter" (which by the way is a great title):

"And to have a whole city which, by custom, the young could treat as their own, to be able to walk down its High Street as confidently as though it were your garden path, to be free to be arrogant and absurd­ to annoy other people by making loud, precious talk in restaurants, or to carry a grass snake with you when you went to parties­ that was the kind of thing that you would never be able to do unselfconsciously elsewhere, and which you needed to do."