Two chairs

It's raining, my darling man is at the Venice Film Festival, and I've run out of chocolate that my friend Laura brings me every time she visits. She knows me far too well, and bring books of poetry and thick, purple slabs of Dairy Milk. It's dawned on me that summer is over, that I miss my friends in Los Angeles a lot and that social media is an absolute pariah when you are an empath, as apparently I am. But all moaning aside, on Saturday evening I went for a little pre-dinner walk along the Chiltern Way and then back through the fields beyond Hawridge. There is a path through a bean field. The beans are black and dry, and the ground is covered in chamomile and buttercups and shrubby grass. There was a hot air balloon on the horizon, the ubiquitous, soothing wood pigeons were doing their Kate Bush best, and the dogs were happy. And then appeared two modern-ish kitchen chairs, just parked in the middle of the field, overlooking the spectacular valley, two simple metal and plastic chairs. I looked at them and thought, this is it, really, isn't it? People that care enough about the land they live in and the other people who live in it to park two chairs randomly in a huge bean field, purely for the pleasure of stopping for a while in nature. Someone dragged two chairs miles across a field and plonked them there for the happiness of others. Perhaps that idea is what we build a world on?