Painting with Rape Seed

As you can see, my journey has started but I've a way to go yet. I'm posting this from Heathrow Terminal 5, having already been on three separate trains, a tram, and a plane. I've another plane and finally a car ride to go before I get to my final destination! Spotted this out of the window somewhere over the Berkshire countryside. These fields look very old, the boundaries the product of a very long history, but it's hard not to have a sneaky suspicion that the farmer here has a whimsical imagination. I'll be interested to know what you see ... and if you think this pattern is a product of chance or design?

I now have a few hours before my next flight but I don't travel often enough to be fed up with all the waiting around. In fact, I rather enjoy all aspects of international travel - once I've checked by bags that is. With that job done you hand over responsibility to the airline and, for me at least, that actually confers a wonderful sense of freedom. Until I get to baggage reclaim at the other end I have no decisions to make, no jobs to finish, no training to do, no food to cook, and no guilt to feel at not working on any of the hundred things that always seem to buzzing away in my head! In short, I'm relaxing. And it's a joy.

I have time to people-watch, to have a wander and look at the architecture - which is often interesting in these vast terminal buildings - and, best of all, I have time to read. There is no better time to get stuck into a good book than while waiting around at airports. I've currently got stuck into The Stolen Village, the true story of the Baltimore Sack, when in 1631 pirates from Algiers and armed troops of the Turkish Ottoman Empire stormed ashore at the little harbour village of Baltimore in West Cork, capturing almost all the villagers and bearing them away to a life of slavery in North Africa. It's quite astonishing.

Tomorrow you'll find out where my destination lies.