Brown and pleasant land

The setting on the countryside appears to have been turned from ‘lush’, through ‘ripe’ and all the way up to ‘crispy’. The whole nation looks positively Tuscan. This does not mean that people have started drizzling their pork scratchings with olive oil but rather that the usual palette of rich greens, dark browns and the occasional brooding concrete blot has been replaced by golds and yellows. It really does make one want to sing some sort or rustic harvesting song, possibly involving a milkmaid, possibly not. If you’re a hay fever sufferer it makes you want to sit inside with the curtains drawn scowling at the weather forecast while sniffing and dabbing your streaming eyes.

Also gold and brown are the lawns of the nation. We now appear to be lurching our way towards the sort of scenery you normally see combusting picturesquely behind some loony reporter as he talks about dropped cigarettes, forest fires and ‘houses in great danger if the wind changes’ (all the time thinking ‘which would look a lot cooler on camera than shrubbery smouldering’).

And indeed, saw my first grass fire of the season the other day.

It was on a trip up to Runcorn, where I am receiving treatment for an ingrowing ego. Runcorn is within teeing-off distance of the golf club in Liverpool where they were playing the open and, for once telly and real life were in perfect harmony. On the television the only blobs of colour were the humorously attired golfers strutting about the place (hey, if some sweatshop owning trainer company wants to pay me ten mill a year, I’d dress like a pantomime cow with a swoosh on my ass if they said so) and in nearby Runcorn the green had gone brown. And this is the north!

Driving from the hospital one passes a KFC (strategically placed near the wing dealing with eating disorders so the bulimics can order a bucket of Krispy Freaking Chickenybits then have something handy to throw up into afterwards) and across from that, a grass bank…on fire.

Luckily, two small boys were in attendance. A spreading bush fire was being stamped into submission by two twelve year olds. All you could smell was burning grass and singed reebok. Knowing I would be near Liverpool, I had drilled dialing 999 and did so. At the same time some bloke with a fire extinguisher leapt from his car and spoiled all the fun by managing to put out the fire just as it reached the bushes.

It really was the oddest thing. A ring of fire, a la Johnny Cash, slowly creeping outwards. All I could think of was the opening credits of ‘Bonanza’.