ACROSS the field echoed the glorious sound of a brass band in full flow. Families sat on straw bales tapping welly-booted feet in time to the music.

Between saxophone salvoes be-ribboned Morris dancers squeeze-boxed their way through their oddly hypnotic choreography.

In one of the tents children wearing flour-smeared pinnies, clouds of organic stoneground billowing around them, learned how to make bread. Outside, their toddler siblings pointed and ooh-ed at the penned lambs, calves and piglets, laughing uproariously as baby Gloucester Old Spots snuffled their snouts, sending clods of earth flying.

Over the way the man-creche – perhaps better known as the beer tent – was doing a roaring trade as the incumbents drank their way through a cornucopia of ale. Next door, in the biggest marquee of the lot, chattering crowds thronged like magpies round the stalls of local food producers stocking up on goods from a bounty of plenty, harvested from land, water or air.

Brawny local lads, with a sly corner eye look at the local lasses coquettishly giggling nearby, tried to outdo each other on the ring-the-bell strong-arm sideshow.

And when the going got peckish there were sandwiches of hot-roasted beef, pulled pork or fantastically fat sausages to tuck into, alongside a wealth of other olfactory offerings, all quality, all local, all freshly cooked.

Posters lovingly produced by local school children depicting their understanding of locally sourced food flapped in the breeze. People watched in fascination as a craftswoman demonstrated how to turn wood on a lathe, just one example of a community craft that had nothing to do with mass-production and everything to do with quality and skill.

And overshadowing all this, glimpsed between the tents and marquees, were the distant fells topped with a scudding sky, a reassuring sight of not just incomparable beauty, but a sense of timelessness, tradition and community.

Welcome, then to the Yorkshire Dales, for this was Leyburn’s annual festival of food and drink on a bank holiday weekend.

Contrast this to less than 24 hours later. I’m on the 0600 train from York for a meeting at Canary Wharf in London beginning at 9am. From King’s Cross it’s lemming-like into the bowels of the capital, down and down into the deep Tube, where platforms heave and people stand blankly whey-faced waiting for the next train.

Getting on is a shoving, pushing exercise of one-upmanship. Heads bend against the curve of the Tube train doors as it hurtles into the yawning gloom. No one speaks, no one makes eye contact.

Hands warily cover handbags as a rush hour bodies-thrust-together precaution against “dippers” or pickpockets.

Other hands try and find purchase on grab rails to maintain balance, bodies ebbing and flowing as one, a little to the left, a little to the right as they mirror the motion of the clattering train.

At the next station people at the doors step back on to the platform to let others off, all the while risking being elbowed out of the way as yet more surge to get on. And still nobody speaks, nobody says thank you and nobody smiles.

Then at London Bridge it’s all change to the Jubilee line, where automatic electric toughened glass doors stretch along the platform edge. The queuing is different here as, unspoken, two lines form at each set of doors with a space in the middle to let people off the trains when they pull in. Then, in unison, the lines surge forward, joining as one in the melee to claim that all-important on-board piece of floor space. Forget about a seat. This time, you’re crushed against the back of a man whose rucksack pokes into your face. It smells musty and unclean, but you’re so hemmed in you can’t turn away so you end up taking shallow breaths in a bid to deny the odour.

It’s only eight minutes from London Bridge to Canary Wharf, but it feels like 80. When you get there it’s with a huge relief as you peel yourself away from such uninvited intimacy and head upwards for fresh air and daylight, blinking mole-like as you surface.

The meeting room in the showcase building you’re heading for is on the 30th floor, with gloriously breath-taking panoramic views across London. The vista is stunning.

But imagine how miserable and uncomfortable it must be to do that journey every day just to see it. I know where I’d rather be. Don’t you?