This morning, as I sometimes do, I went up to the South Downs for a bracing walk.
I set off west along the South Downs way before veering off down Fulking Hill towards the village (I did wonder if the Fulking Phone Box might be working or not) then a mile or so back east to Poynings before climbing up the flank of Devils Dyke.
It is a beautiful clear day. I'm in a plane on my way from New York to Vancouver. My faced pressed against the window, I line up its edge with one of the many long straight roads 30 000 ft below and imagine I am down there; hurtling along at 500mph, scorching through the landscape, blowing up a big trail of dust. Sigur Ross is moaning away most satisfactorily through my headphones.
Last time I travelled this far west I wasn't that happy about being so far from home. On my way back I had to stop in Boston, my then business partner and I had a little spare time so we drove up the coast to Portland (Maine, having been in Portland Oregon a few days before). It is just like driving along a bit of UK coast,(I suppose it was part of the UK a billion years ago)and I felt much better with the familiarity of the landscape and the knowledge that I was just a flight across the Atlantic away from home. This time I am aware that in another metal tube, right now, people from home are following me across the sky, four hours behind me, having set off from Heathrow a couple of hours before I left New York.
It's flat out there at the moment, endless oblong fields, stretched out like a picnic blanket, purples, oranges, greens and yellows. There's another of those extremely meandering rivers that appears to have charcoaled a wiggly line on the material. I have been told that when a river meanders it becomes pi times longer than a straight line between the same two points. Sometimes this seems to make sense, other times not.