Well, here I was again. It was raining this time. Not in itself an earth-shattering state of affairs, but since there didn't seem to have been any rain for weeks, it was at least something to bear in mind.

I stopped here and looked out across the field. It looked okay, I thought.

And then I turned to face in another direction (I was forced to, since the rain was blowing into the lens of my camera). That way looked okay too.

And a bit further on and I thought, yeah, this doesn't look too bad either.

Luckily though, just at the point when things were threatening to degenerate into a production-line of okayness, something or other fell into place, and suddenly what was before me became more than okay. It became pretty good, in fact.

Yes, I decided, I really quite like this.

And this too.

By now I was getting quite wet. But that didn't matter. It didn't matter because there was something irresistible about the way things looked around me right now, in the rain. Compositions were throwing themselves at me. Pre-packaged atmospheric arrangements of trees, fields, lanes, skies, telegraph wires, and ditches kept appearing. Everything was already in its place; everything knew not only what it had to say, but also how to say it. Like a frozen supermarket ready-meal waiting to be heated, the instant aesthetic of the landscape seemed already prepared: all it needed was a few minutes in the microwave. And all I had to do was switch the microwave on. Or maybe I was the microwave. It's hard to say.

But the battle with the weather still raged, and if anything it was the wind and the rain that seemed to be winning. The pictorial double-act I had been performing with the landscape was rapidly grinding to a halt. A south-westerly facing halt, to be precise. Because whenever I tried to look in any other direction, the oncoming torrent of water made it impossible.

Around this point a helicopter flew over. I wasn't sure whether to pay it any attention, as it seemed quite alien to the environment, and bore little relation to anything else I'd seen here so far. But it was quite low and loud and exciting; so I did.

And almost immediately after that a large group of walkers appeared, and walked past. I didn't pay much attention to them. They definitely didn't belong here.