Wilfred Cass himself, a sprightly septagenarian, materialises and falls into step with the party. "He's on to a good thing, isn't he?," moans one as we follow Andy Goldsworthy's "Herd of Arches" (pounds 30,000) through the trees. Everyone likes Steven Gregory's "Paparazzi": a pack of stalking, clawed Cyclops, with cameras for heads. Laura Ford's witty "Nature Girls" - a bush, a conifer and a tree stump whose short human legs end in bright red children's shoes - are both scary and funny: are they little girls hiding or malevolent imps? Four powerful, masked Elizabeth Frink warriors stride down a grassy avenue, their eyes on the horizon. Taking blind corners wide at high speed, he insouciantly wrestles with a map and turns round to grin at us. Finally we screech to a merciful halt outside tall, electronic gates.

This is not perhaps the best frame of mind in which to approach a contemplative experience like Sculpture At Goodwood. The first thing we see beyond the high walls is a pair of monumental, welcoming hands. Walking reverentially between them, even Richard is beginning to look awed. For a while we wander down the hillside, pointing out the strange shapes beneath the trees: an archaic stone circle rooted in long grass, a mysterious figure frozen in the green cathedral nave formed by slender trunks, and two gigantic, oscillating feelers caught in a shaft of sunlight. Down at the bottom where the trees thin out and the meadow begins, is a thicket of slender stone columns of varying height, with what looks like a canoe of wood balanced on top. The brainchild of collectors Wilfred and Jeanette Cass, who live here, the site is a showcase for new British sculpture. The first piece we encounter is a demonstration of the philistinism such work can attract: Lynn Chadwick's 1959 bronze is the oldest in the collection (though this is a recent cast); originally commissioned for a terminal at Heathrow, her winged figure was vehemently opposed by the Guild of Airline Pilots and Aviators, who perhaps considered it unluckily earthbound and unaerodynamic.The grumblers in our group, fingering their price-lists, would probably agree with the aviators. "HELLO, I'm Richard.

I'll be your maniac for the day." Of course, he doesn't actually say this; he smiles engagingly and shows no obvious sign of derangement. Then I find myself hurtling along country lanes round the Goodwood estate, in the back of a small car driven by a young headcase who, unlike me, is not at all in touch with his mortality. it might be a terminal illness double album."6 "Trash" is out on 29 July Suede's third album, Coming Up, follows in September.. Anderson's metallic blue eyes catch the light: "It depends on the length of the illness ... What else is going to matter when you're pushing up the daisies and all of your possessions have been put into black plastic bags and carted off to charity shops?" The Terminal Illness EP has quite a nice ring to it. The band will not be joining their peers on the open-air festival circuit this summer either.

Brett laughs: "It plays f--king havoc with your hair.""If I found out next week that I had a terminal illness," he continues cheerfully, "I wouldn't be jetting off to Barbados, I'd be going into the studio to make another record. And Suede's current schedule does not allow time for drug-crazed debauchery. At times over the past couple of years, rumours have suggested that their singer's determination to escape such scary suburban demons might bring him perilously close to a different kind of oblivion. While Anderson will never be one for what he smilingly terms "the little house on the prairie look", he seems to be in much better shape than his enemies would hope. "I can pretend to escape them, but they're always there." Why should that be the case? "I don't know [melodramatically], I'm just a poor white kid brought up in a load of shit."There was a song on Suede's last album about being "enslaved in a pebble dash grave, with a kid on the way". Where Bowie's great gift has been the ability to uproot himself at will, one of the most intriguing things about Suede is that they could fly to the moon and invisible elastic would still ping them back to the Gatwick branch-line. "I'm nailed to the floor when it comes to roots," Anderson admits ruefully.