Technicolor Shire and the French Non-Connection.

The Shire is in its summer colourful phase at the moment. The barley is just about ripe and their fields are glowing pale yellow. The wheat is beginning to ripen and the heads are now yellow/green rather than blue/green. The borage (I’m told that’s what it is) which flanks the edges of the cornfield as part of a re-wilding policy is in flower, and they add a most fetching lilac blue to the mix. And of course, the copper beech trees still have their full mantle of deep wine red. Add to that the blue sky, white clouds, and the pale green covering the hills across the valley, and the whole is a picture to lift the spirits.

Over the next two moths the harvest will happen and the borage flowers will die off. And then the fields will be a scrubby mess of pale straw until the muck spreading and ploughing turns the fields back to dull brown.

Autumn will begin to show its face and soon the autumn colourful phase will be upon us as the leaves turn to gold and red. And then they’ll fall as so much dry detritus and return the land to a brown vista dotted with black skeletons.

And so we enjoy the picture postcard view as long as it lasts because we know that nothing ever does.

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A car with French plates passed me slowly and respectfully on the lane today. It was only the second car with French plates I’ve ever seen in this Shire or the previous one. The last one I saw some years ago stopped and a young woman with what sounded to me like a Parisian accent asked me for directions to the Old Manor. Today’s car didn’t stop at all, and that was a shame. Maybe I would have better luck if I wore a badge proclaiming I’m Currently Driving a Renault. Not much point though, is there? I’ll probably be long gone before another car with French plates saunters and shrugs its way along the local byways. (It was red, by the way, instead of blue as one would expect of a French vehicle.)

We do have a French woman living in the Shire, but she drives a German car. It’s black.