It was the sort of November evening which cries out for a feeling of warmth through the underside of the socks as you sink into a leather armchair by the fire. In Northumberland Avenue it was dark and wet and the wind was coming off the Thames with the sort of force which, in Wodehouse’s day, would have seen top hats and policemen's helmets blown off heads and bowling along the street together. Turning the corner cheered the spirits. All the lights were on in the National Liberal Club and the interior of the dining room was clearly illuminated up above the level of the street lamps. In the entrance hall the bust of Gladstone looked as stern as ever. The portrait of Winston Churchill by the stairs still made him look unfeasibly young. But wander down the stairs and the equivalent of the restoring warmth enfolded you as you entered the picture-lined sanctum of the Savage Club.

The throng within were being polite to one another at the bar, attempting to find themselves in the albums of photographs of the recent celebratory dinner, and trying to pick up the thread of what on earth the esteemed chairman of the PG Wodehouse Society might be saying to them. Fortunately Colonel NTP Murphy remembered his army days and was the model of clarity as he called the evening to order. His description of the gathering as ‘few but firm’ seemed a little inaccurate from where we stood, our view partly blocked by the numbers at the bar.

There were cheers when he announced that: ‘We have to hold an annual general meeting every year’. Some people felt that this might have been self-evident. But he then announced that the annual general meeting was traditionally very short and that he hoped we were on for a record this year. The record, he said, stood at nine minutes. The record-attempt was then slowed to a crawl while a dispute had to be resolved amongst several members over whether or not the record was actually seven minutes and, if so, in which year that might have been.

NTP pushed on. He paid tribute to Tony Ring, editor of Wooster Sauce, and in particular to the amount of work involved in getting the 900 copies prepared, produced and dispatched to members in such an efficient fashion. Ring then made a few remarks about forthcoming issues of Wooster Sauce. The company were left in no doubt that its high standard would be maintained and that much in the way of delights were being planned.

The chairman then paid tribute to John Fletcher and Chris Reece for their tireless work on maintaining the website. Mr Fletcher looked suitably gruntled at this. The chairman then turned his attention to the Society’s committee and said that the Society was ‘very lucky to have a committee like this who all work very hard’. Members of the committee scattered around the room, it was noted, looked contented if still a touch careworn at this tribute.

The chairman then paid tribute to Nick Townend, the Society’s Treasurer, who sadly was not at the gathering. ‘The committee’, intoned the chairman, ‘are in awe of his financial ability’, and he then talked briefly about things like spreadsheets, though without giving the impression that he read them over his breakfast marmalade. Helen Murphy spoke about how the membership of the Society spread to the ends of the earth in several directions. ‘From Japan to Jordan’, she said, ‘from Malaysia to Morocco, and from Brazil to Bhutan’. She explained this last reference by pointing out that when Sir Edward Cazalet had called in on the Chief Justice of Bhutan while on holiday there he had discovered him to be a devotee of things Wodehousean and had signed him up on the spot.

Helen Murphy’s geographical information went down well with the assembled members, one of whom, having spent 35 years in exile in Brisbane, Australia, had come back for his first holiday in Blighty since the start of his exile and had found that it coincided with the Savage Club meeting. He was having a very happy evening.

Helen pointed out that the membership stood at 911 paid-up stalwarts. The chairman then announced that anyone wishing to inspect Nick Townend’s immaculate spreadsheets could do so but the nub of the issue was that the Society had finished the year with a surplus of £3,300 compared with the previous year’s surplus of £2,300. This, he said, would enable the Society to subsidise some more regional meetings. He then paid tribute to Tim Andrew who, he pointed out, had put in an enormous amount of work organising the great Lincoln’s Inn dinner of a few weeks back only to miss it through being sent, briefly, to China to talk to a gathering of thousands of educationalists. Those by the bar agreed that anyone who was familiar with the prize-giving at Market Snodsbury Grammar School would have been up to the task.

Then the chairman made a momentous announcement. He revealed that in May next year, when he reaches his 70th birthday, he intends standing down as chairman. But we were not to worry as Hilary Bruce had agreed to take over the role. On this news he announced that the meeting was over and by his timing it had taken the predicted nine minutes. Several people by the bar who appeared to have been running a book looked glum at this news but perked up when the barman suggested a few refills might be in order.

Tony Ring then made an announcement. He pointed out that the exhibition at Dulwich College celebrating the centenary of Wodehouse’s first book, The Pothunters, had received a review in the Mail on Sunday newspaper the previous weekend. There were only two reviews on the page. The other was of a new exhibition by the notorious conceptual artist and inept bed-maker, Tracey Emin. The Mail had awarded Emin’s exhibition two stars but the Dulwich exhibition four. People agreed that, while it might be a close run thing, civilisation looked as though it still had some legs.

Then came what the sporting fancy might refer to as ‘the main event of the evening’. Elin Woodger, onetime president of The Wodehouse Society in America and now, of course, married to the P G Wodehouse Society’s esteemed chairman, gave her considered views on the question of ‘living over here’.

She started by pointing out ‘how sweet it is to have something in common with PG Wodehouse. In his life’, she said, ‘he had the pleasure of living in and loving two countries, England and the United States, and now that pleasure,' she said, ‘is mine as well’.

But there were clouds. ‘When I moved here I never quite anticipated some of the adjustments I would have to make,' she said. ‘I even thought it would be a snap – my forebears are from this country, and we speak the same language, after all, so how difficult could it be?’

The answer, of course, starts with the weather. ‘Marrying Norman’, she said, ‘brought a lot of sunshine into my life – but there was a lot of rain as well once I moved over here.’ The rain set in. ‘After the fourth month, I was being asked plaintively, "But don’t you get rain in your country?" Well, yes, but the almost unceasing surfeit of it here has been a bit trying at times. She then pointed out that she should have known better – ‘Wodehouse has reported this phenomenon often enough in his books’ – a thesis she then illustrated with extracts from The Girl On The Boat, quoting the plight of Mr Rufus Bennett: ‘Mr Bennett, who had lived his life in a country of warmth and sunshine, the thing affected much the same way as the early days of the Flood must have affected Noah. A first startled resentment had given place to a despair too militant to be called resignation.’

She said she knew exactly how he felt and in particular his feelings some four days later when ‘he suddenly became aware of something bright and yellow resting beside the watch, and paused, transfixed, like Robinson Crusoe staring at the footprint in the sand. If he had not been in England, he would have said that it was a patch of sunshine’. Several more examples followed before she reached a conclusion about the weather that ‘now that I have been here a year, I can only say that my admiration for the British just grows daily. No wonder it’s a great country – if Brits can survive the weather, they can survive anything.’

The next section of her talk proved to be completely incomprehensible, being, as it was, a long and complex peroration on the non-existence in Britain of something called grape jelly. Fortunately it turns out that so many of her visiting countrymen, hearing from afar of her plight, have filled the Woodger-Murphy larder full to bursting with dozens of jars of the stuff. ‘Conversely,' she said, ‘I am told that America would be an even better place if it had marmite, kippers and toast racks.' There were cheers from all around the room at this startling, though perceptive, remark. These increased as she warmed to her theme by telling us that: ‘While I would dispute the marmite and kippers – I am neutral when it comes to toast racks – I would personally add sausage rolls, black pudding, and, yes, haggis to the approved list.’

She then turned her attention to the differences in eating habits on either side of the great Atlantic Ocean. She quoted Lord Emsworth’s famous complaints that tea was served in little bags and boiled eggs arrive mashed up in a little glass in American quarters. ‘I must tell you’, she proceeded to tell us, ‘that the first time I mashed up a boiled egg in front of Norman, he looked at me with an expression of shock and horror, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had married. But now he only looks away with a slight shudder, pretending he hasn’t seen. I might also add’, she then added, ‘that since my arrival in England, he has become a convert to teabags. Today teabags, tomorrow boiled eggs is the way I look at it.’

Then it was time for cricket to get the treatment. Tony Ring, who was standing at around short-leg to where Woodger was taking guard, looked up interestedly. He was wearing his MCC blazer. ‘My comprehension of cricket still leaves a lot to be desired, even after long and patient explanations have been tendered to me’, she said and then launched into an illustrative passage from Piccadilly Jim. She pointed out that the trans-Atlantic Wodehouse was one of those rare individuals who understood both cricket and baseball equally well. Here she quoted from "How’s That Umpire?" from Nothing Serious: ‘He was still in a sort of trance when they took their seats in the pavilion, but here it was less noticeable, for everybody else was in a sort of trance. The somnambulists out in the field tottered to and fro, and the spectators lay back and let their eyes go glassy. For perhaps an hour nothing happened except that Hodger of Middlesex, waking like Abou ben Adhem from a deep dream of peace, flicked his bat at a rising ball and edged it into the hands of a sleeper dozing in what is technically known as the gully.' ‘In all fairness’, said Elin, ‘I can tell you that I have been to baseball games just as dormant in nature as this.’

There then followed a deft excoriation of the profusion of roundabouts in London’s traffic system before she turned her attention to ‘the language gap’. ‘Oh, the difference in our vocabularies!’, she exclaimed. ‘You call it a full-stop, we call it a period. You call it pudding, we call it dessert. You call it a socket, we call it an outlet. And on it goes. My husband and my step-granddaughter never miss an opportunity to inform me of some language error I have made inadvertently. I didn’t know I couldn’t speak English until I came to England’, she said. ‘But I’m learning.’

She noted the stream of quaint village names in a Mulliner story as George Mulliner debates the identity of Higgleford-cum-Wortlebury, amongst others. ‘My wonder and admiration for British nomenclature only increases whenever I take a drive into the English countryside’, she said. She produced an example. ‘For instance’, she said, ‘driving back to London from Great Dunmow – this is true, by the way – you pass in turn through Philpot End, then High Roding, Aythorpe Roding, Leaden Roding, Margaret Roding, and Beauchamp Roding, then a left turn to Pigstye Green and you finally reach my favourite of all: Shellow Bowells.’

She concluded that she now concurred with another past president of The Wodehouse Society, Dan Garrison, who once said that: ‘England is a collection of odd traditions inhabited by natives’. She quoted the American philosopher, George Santayana, who wrote: ‘England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours’.

‘For the past year I have discovered the many ways in which this is true’, she said, ‘and now that I’m a native myself, I can look forward to many more years of discovery. And I’m very glad I came.’

The rafters shook amidst the applause which greeted this generous final thought.

The rest of the evening passed in an animated fashion as topics such as baseball and its odd sporting vocabulary were discussed. Good English beer was drunk and the wearying November weather outside receded in the memories as the growing glow of the pleasures of an evening amongst fellow Wodehouseans took hold.