Gerald is standing in green grass this August, and the field across the lane has gone the colour of a paper bag, and the only difference between the two of them is a plough. You can see the line from the gateway. It runs along the hedge like somebody drew it with a ruler. One side is pale and cracked wide enough to put a finger in and it crunches when you walk on it. The other side gives underfoot, and it is green, and there is a nine hundred kilogram Hereford working across the middle of it at the speed of a man reading a newspaper he has already read. The lane field was ploughed and reseeded four years ago. New ley, high yield, drilled for a heavy first cut, and it gave one, and it has given less every year since, because the roots on it stop about four inches down where the drill left them. Four inches of soil in a dry August holds nothing. The man who owns it has had the bowser out twice this week and is buying feed in the middle of summer, which is the thing no farmer wants a neighbour to watch him do. Gerald's forty acres have not had a plough on them since some time in the eighteenth century. Nobody planted that sward. It arrived over two hundred years of being grazed and dunged and rained on and otherwise left alone, and it is about forty different things growing in among each other, half of which have no commercial name, several of which have gone down after water past two metres. There is no dry spell in the recorded history of this country that reaches two metres. So the grass keeps coming in the worst month of the year, and the bull keeps eating it, and what he leaves behind goes back in and the beetles have it buried inside a week and the roots go down after it again. He came down a ramp there at five months old, looked at the whole forty acres for about ninety seconds, and walked to the south corner. He has never revisited the decision. Not in a drought, not in a hailstorm, not in the eleven days of horizontal rain, not at minus six with the trough iced solid. Same corner, same hour, same pace, for four years, in a country where everything else has an opinion about the weather. The south corner has seven wildflower species in it now, and a bumblebee count, and a dung beetle population, and none of that was anybody's project. It is just what happens to ground that has one animal standing on it who has never once been talked out of anything. There is no scheme paying for any of this. No contractor, no invoice, no line in the paperwork, because in the paperwork this field is classified as unimproved land, which is the official term for ground nobody has got round to wrecking yet. The hedge is thick. The wall stands because the bottom of it is grazed. The swallows are over the middle of the field at seven every evening working the flies that follow him about, and they are not over the lane field, because there is nothing over there to work. Half the country is being told the animal in that field is the reason the weather has gone wrong. The animal in that field is the reason it is still green. Gerald has not been informed that he is unimproved. Gerald is in the south corner. The south corner is fine.