Everything was beginning to seem a lot more comfortable now. The air was pleasantly warm, the breeze was gentle, people seemed more relaxed, the days were becoming longer, the evenings more leisurely. It was spring, quite obviously.

As I was walking I began to think about van Gogh's descriptions of his arrival in the south of France, and his excited anticipation of the coming of the new season there. He'd arrived in winter from the north, and had been confronted by a snowy Provençe, which he'd enthused about in his famous letters to his brother. But his excitement was always somehow tempered by the prospect of things getting even better when the spring and summer finally did arrive. Or at least it appeared to be tempered. Knowing, as we do now, that van Gogh was about to embark on his finest and most productive period, it is of course easy to imagine that this is how he must have felt. Easy, that is, to draw the conclusion that what he encountered in the months before his sunflower apogee he understood himself to be a mere preamble to what was to follow.

Was any of this relevant to what I was doing, I wondered? Had the last month's efforts merely been something that had had to be endured? Was everything I'd witnessed so far some sort of weak intimation of what was to come? Probably not, I decided. After all, this wasn't Provençe; and I wasn't van Gogh, or even a painter for that matter. And it wasn't the late 19th century, either.

It was spring, this much was certain. But that wasn't significant. All that meant was that things were becoming more spring-like; a dumbly literal fact which admittedly changed certain things in certain respects, but didn't really affect what it was I was doing. An experiment with horizontality was still an experiment with horizontality, I reasoned, before executing one in the delightfully warm late afternoon breeze.

It was probably true though that the particular way the spring sun was hitting the mole hills in this field had led me today to feel compelled to jump between them.

Did any of this have anything at all to do with beauty, I wondered?