Emerging victorious from a winding race against imagined rivals, my truck flies up through the damp and
shivery bluebelled woods on the western side of Ashdown Forest to encounter a cheering throng of about
a zillion fluffy dandelion seed heads dewily bejewelled and backlit by the
rising sun.
At breakfast time, four hours in to my working day, Barb the wise coffee woman at Waitrose in
Crowborough is sliding my best coffee in town across the counter before I can open
my mouth to order it.
Much later, as I wash the dishes after supper, a huge thundery cloud edged
with silver darkens the western horizon where we look out across the Thames
Valley from Putney Heath towards Kew and Northolt and the very distant Chalfonts. By a trick of light and perspective, a
solitary late sunbeam finds a gap and slopes up from left to right, and for a few minutes a succession
of gleaming jets flying out of Heathrow seem to climb that beam as if it were a
Freeway to Heaven.
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