Certain views here seem quite specifically to belong to here, I thought as I looked across the field at the row of trees. They seem to have their own particular feel. They seem to articulate their hereness quite strongly. Others are more general. This was probably the latter, I felt, on reflection. It really could be anywhere. But I knew it was here, as I'd looked at it myself, while I was standing here. It must therefore have attached to it a kind of hereness - just not a visual kind of hereness. Whether or not that changed anything, I wasn't sure. I decided not to think about it any more, in any case

Lusher, greener, mistier; yeah, but so what - the same old views were the same old views. What was I doing here?

I wondered how much longer I could keep up this facade of interest. Or more accurately, I wondered how much longer it would be before I gave in to the fact that I had quite simply become more interested in other things. Today more than ever I felt my attention drawn away towards some of those other things. Like sheds, for instance.

But there it was again, the thing that I had kept on making myself pay attention to.

There was an almost overwhelming sense of the end credits rolling today, which made it a little difficult to keep focussed. So as a last throw of the dice I decided to climb over a gate and try out a new route.

There was a pleasing softness in the sky that was pervading things, I noticed as I looked around. I was hoping that by noticing this I would find myself once again slipping back into the old routine of noticing things, and indeed caring about the fact that I'd noticed them.

But it wasn't the same anymore. The emptiness of the landscape was still there of course; but somehow it was no longer an enticing and meaningful emptiness - it was now just emptiness, pure and simple. It felt cold, unsympathetic, absent. As I looked around at the familiar featureless expanse, the long grass fluttering this way and that in the brisk wind, I wondered what it was that had changed.

There was still something here, something that on another day I might have described as a kind of vitality, but that now I could only think of in cool, matter-of-fact terms. Today the lush green grass spoke only of it itself: "grass", it said. Okay, it was lush, long, green, flitting about in the wind; all that was still true. But there was no poetry anymore. There was just grass.

Had there ever been anything else? That was difficult to say. I at least wanted to believe that there had. I wanted to convince myself that I had been here for a reason, that I hadn't been simply wasting my time looking for something that wasn't there to be found.

But since I had never really had much of an idea what it was I was looking for, it was impossible to say with any real authority how successful or indeed unsuccessful I had been in trying to find it. In fact it wasn't even clear that I'd been looking for anything anyway. No, I remembered with sudden clarity, I'd never actually been looking for anything. That was just a habit of thought I'd got into at the beginning which seemed to fit (more or less) with what I was doing, and that I'd carried on using largely for the sake of convenience.

Since I wasn't looking for anything then, I reassured myself, the fact that I seemed not to have found anything in the end didn't matter. What I could say was that I'd been here (a lot), and that if anything was to have happened here I would have witnessed it. But I don't think anything did happen, so I didn't really get to witness anything, as such. But at least I had been here, just in case. That was the main thing.

It was starting to get a bit cold now. There wasn't much point in prolonging this any further, I decided, and headed home.