Bastille

The fourteenth of July and we are on our way to France.  We are staying in Dover, as Shelley did, and will arrive on French soil the day after Bastille Day, as Wordsworth did; I like such historical links, and as a writer feel I am walking in the footsteps of giants.  

The south of England looked parched and barren compared with the fields on the Borders.  There are far more hay fields and the gold of the hay and the parched gold of the wayside grass seems to make a landscape - a fieldscape - of golden grass and heavy green trees.  Wiltshire always seems to be made up of long low hills of grass, how I imagine Kansas.  Then suddenly we are in Dover and then on the A2, as Shelley was nearly two centuries ago.  And tomorrow, France...