As happy as a farmer in muck

I’M hazy about the exact time, but it’s about 2pm and a summer’s afternoon like they used to make. Pulsating sun, sultry, nothing stirring, except for a desultory cabbage white butterfly, nothing sounding except for crickets in the long grass on the lane. The birds, exhausted by breeding, have entered the great July silence. One bird only sings: a wood pigeon deep in the lime tree, roocooing absent-mindedly, soporifically.

A countryside so stilled and breathless it seems trapped in a sequence of landscape paintings: pale Limousin cattle grouped under the parasol of an oak; the field of creamy, heavy-headed wheat awaiting