To know the weather is not knowing, It’s about watching the changes. I remember as a child the heavy frosts. How the grass would crunch under the feet. The small stacks of particles glittering and sparkling under the street lights, making the tops of walls look soft, white and furry. Toes numb, breath hanging heavy in the sharp black air. Placescape: When you stay in one place things become revealed, from behind the ground surface, weather surface. There is always a surface to every place and an underneath. I’ve been cycling the three miles between my cottage and the village for five weeks. The sky is always a blanket of greyness, only the darker, low skies bring the rains. The land is soaked, enclosed in wetness. It’s so full of water that it appears to hold it in strange, gravity-defying places. A miniature lake will slowly form at the top of field; or the curve in a lane on a hillside will miraculously hold a large puddle, where I’m sure it should be escaping downwards, finding its way to the stream. In the summer, these same water-logged fields mist and drip with sticky chemicals. I want to close my eyes and dream this unreality away. There is an abundance of mould and fungal growth.

I dropped a bundle of spars from my shoulder and watched a billowing cloud of fine, green, dusty spores drift upwards, off the scaffolding and away. The rain keeps coming, and coming. Farmscape: there are ideas of efficiency, of large – scale production and maximum yield. With each new idea, new method, there is a redundancy, a replacement. Effluence is a good idea forgotten. Grass grows through the affluence, entwining it, becoming a strange organic mass. Black, green, wood, glass, leaves, wire, grass, chemicals. The contemporary landscape is moulded by the modern world, but most of all by the fundamental thing present at all times: the weather. It seems we now have a contemporary weather to add to our modern lifestyles, un-seasonal and unpredictable. Some changes appear slow and subtle, others fast and drastic. We use the land and the environment for our own means. But as the weather changes, we are finding that it too has the power to manipulate. It is stumbling forwards, reaching backwards. Nature is immense and complex. There will always be a nature, just not so hospitable.