rapeseed – don't confuse the narrator

predictable

The problem with taking pictures of plants is that they tend to be the same ones every year. Especially as we are creatures of habit and we take the same routes to and from the same places on a regular basis.

But even though I see these yellow fields from the train window in spring and early summer every year, as I travel from Gloucester towards south Wales, they never cease to impress. So here they are again.

At least I suppose the light reflections and the stains on the train windows are probably different each year.

yellow

The word yellow has been wandering through my mind in search of something to connect with.

It could connect with bulldozer. It could connect with huge chunky slablike somethings that hang in the air in much the same way that bricks don’t. It could connect with the small, leech-like Babel fish.

It could connect with the eyes of a huge eagle with circles tattooed on its wings, or with Kate Schechter’s battered Citroën 2CV.

It could, of course, just connect to fields like the one in the photo, and the rapeseed flowers that are spreading across the English countryside at this time of year: a veritable Suffusion of Yellow.

yellow shift

I expect if I had been standing still, I could have framed the photo a little better, but it was taken through the window of a moving train so is a bit sketchy.

The train was one of the oldest and tattiest I’ve been on for years, and it wasn’t going that fast, so I don’t suppose I can really blame the transformation of the green Cotswolds countryside to such a brilliant yellow on the Doppler effect caused by the speed I was travelling at.