the new emotional blackmailer's handbook

At first light, almost an an hour before sunrise, I am driving up out of some darker than black woods into the deep blue sky, and as I emerge on the highest part of Ashdown Forest there is just the smokiest glimmer of red on the horizon before the road winds inky blue down again towards the next mass of trees ... and a big headed owl flashes fast across my path in the headlights.

Later, Radio3 are playing an Astor Piazzola big band sort of tango from a concert in the early 1980s, just as the truck is rolling and yawing along a humpy-dippy Wealden village street and, for three blissful seconds, sending my arse and shoulders right out of the seat and twisting and bouncing my whole body exactly in time to the music.

At mid-day, an old oak stands thickly frosted in the middle of an unploughed field on the Downs above Merstham and it casts an oval grey shadow some distance across the ochre-coloured stubble, in the middle of which shadow the remaining thick frost somehow reflects the sky's pale blueness.