As you read the paper this morning, I hope I am sitting beside a pool under the palm trees with something nice in my glass and thumbing through a guide to the hills in Portugal's Algarve - with an afternoon drive in mind.

Those hills are alive with the sound of silence. The quiet country roads curling through hundreds of square miles of cork forest with spectacular wild flowers and a day-long chorus of birdsong. Here and there a small hostelry with Mediterranean salads, chicken piri piri and quaffable local wine.

Tomorrow we might drive down to St Lucia on the coast and spoil ourselves with fresh seafood. They bring you huge disposable tablecloths and a hoard of paper napkins because you can't stop the juiciness and sauciness getting all over the place. The sun is high and hot, but there's a lovely breeze from the Atlantic to make the perfect summer day. And the light - it's so light! The great German poet Goethe said he didn't know what light was until he went to southern Europe.

I love the blatant Catholic churches with their images and relics, life-size statues of the Virgin, holy water and forests of tall candles. The religion in those parts is as bright and cheerful as the sunlight and the sea breeze. I often used to wonder why religion in England was such a shamefaced thing - all about confessing your sins in a dark corner and being quiet about it.

In the Algarve, religion is as it used to be in England before the Protestant Reformation. Processions and dancing, cakes and ale with Mass in Latin in the open fields and incense and "Ave Maria" - young girls in white dresses and old ladies in lace veils. You can believe in a religion like that. And in the Algarve in springtime, to the City of Loule, they bring the great statue of Our Lady from the hills with brass bands and fireworks and the whole pageant of carnival. The street market is open day and night through the festivities, with freshly baked bread, olive oil, tomatoes, peppers, pineapples and ice creams.

You can drive down the coast road to Cape St Vincent, the extreme western tip of Europe from where Henry the Navigator set sail on his epic voyages half a millennium ago and in ships like the models you float in the bath. Or up to Monchique in the mountains where the weather is certainly "a coat cooler" as we say in Yorkshire and all points north. There's the Moorish castle at Silves, and, to the east, the border with Spain, a gorgeous river meandering among villages in their timeless misty drowsiness.

People ask my wife and me: "Why do you go there? There's nothing to do!" Answer: "We like nothing to do". There's far too much doing and not enough simply being if you ask me. And there's an art in studied idleness that is truly restorative.

Anyhow, I'm not idle! Every morning I walk from breakfast on my balcony to the swimming pool. And in the evening through the rose garden as far as the dining room. That's exercise enough, isn't it? And reading - the chance to read, to catch up on all the books you've been meaning to get round to but couldn't for the relentless rush of City life.

The starlit evenings are mellow with the classical guitar. And the cloak of sleep.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.