Quite enough for me

I’d never really noticed agricultural machinery until I was in France this summer. And the reason for this change in perspective? The fact that I had an almost-four-year-old as my guide. But it’s one of those interesting phenomena in life that once something has been brought to your attention, it’ll confront you at every opportunity. So where previously my eye would have been drawn to the contours of the hillside or perhaps to a steeple rising above the trees, now it was drawn – inexorably, it seemed – to the small block of colour working its way slowly across the field.

It’s just the same with certain words. You live in ignorance of them for years, and then one day a new one pops up on your radar – and never quite leaves it. Take the word ‘atavistic’, for example. I’d managed very well without it until I was approaching early adulthood, and then one day I came across it, stopped and thought about it, looked it up (in a dictionary, as one used to do), and life has been just slightly different ever since. In fact, for a while after that first moment of discovery, that word seemed to follow me everywhere. It still pops up regularly in my line of sight.

And how had I never noticed that at a certain time of year those agricultural machines are everywhere, bound up as they are with the changing seasons and all that? I really don’t know, but, now that my eyes have been alerted, I’m taking a brand-new pleasure in how very simple and constant the commercial world of agricultural machinery seems to be. And, even better, it’s just the same whether you’re this side of the channel or that one, which means I came back from France to discover that my new-found knowledge was as applicable here as it was there. Here, too, the fields were full of those little blocks of colour, and here, too, red meant one manufacturer and green meant another.

Of course I might be wrong, and perhaps there’s a lot more to it than that – but that’s the thing, you see. Until you disillusion me, and until you introduce a whole new set of values into the equation, it’ll be as if those values don’t exist. And then once you (or the almost-four-year-old) have explained to me that, actually, agricultural machinery is as complex and subtle and nuanced and aesthetically influenced as any modern industry, I’ll wonder how I’d never noticed these things before. But, until then, those little blocks of colour will be quite enough for me.