This is always the first bit you see, or rather the first bit you notice. The point at which you think to yourself, "right, I'm not at home any more - I've left the house".

And this is the slightly tedious bit which always goes on a bit too long.

At certain points during these last few days I may have been thinking to myself that I might well have produced some fairly interesting images, in which some kind of profound statement had been made about the relation between the sky, the ground, and the horizon in between. Here is that same sentiment painted onto the side of a barn. By children, quite possibly. This is simply how the landscape looks round here. There's nothing profound about it.

The same field I photographed on the first day.

And the same point beyond which, as I've stated previously, things become interesting.

There it was again: sky, ground, horizon in between. And the same urge to somehow bear witness to it.

But it's just a field. How can I move beyond this banality?

This time I was overwhelmingly possessed by the conviction that the fact that there were some pools of water in the foreground, and that they were reflecting the morning light, made this something different. A more compelling image. Something that would say something. But actually, deep in my heart, I think I knew that it didn't. It was still just a field.

I now seemed to be looking for differences: looking for the ways in which what I had already seen and experienced could be different on a particular visit. Here, for instance - the same place which had already become something of a favourite of mine, a place that had started to feel familiar, that I had almost begun to look forward to seeing - here the presence of a man, a dog, and a bird seemed to have made it alien again. Was this what I wanted?

Shortly after I'd been pondering these ideas, the man turned back and started yelling at me about the fact I couldn't be here. Eight days ago, he said, a new gate had been installed (which I'd just walked through), beyond which it was now forbidden to walk, cycle or drive. It's because of the birds, he explained. Or at least I think he did, as he was speaking very fast in German.

So I turned around and headed back the way I came, probably sulking slightly. At some point I must have stopped to make this image, but there's no conviction in it, you can tell. My whole thinking at this point had been that I was going to start making the same journey to the same spot - every morning, before I did anything else. Today had been the first day. It was to have been the first day of many. My somewhat despairing earlier thoughts about the banality of everything I saw would simply have become the site of a proper investigation. Like that old quote by Lucy Lippard about minimalist art - the viewer being bored, more bored, intolerably bored, then passing through the other side of boredom into a realm which could only be described as "interest". That's what I was thinking I was going to be doing. But now I couldn't even do that. Well, not here anyway.

This one reminded me of a jigsaw. You may be interested to know that I photoshopped out a stray branch in this image, which had been jutting rather cumbersomely into the centre of the sky. In the jigsaw it would probably have been covered with a label in any case - "1000 pieces", or something like that.