A kilometre of narrow stream encircles our field. It begins and ends in a wide pool beside my studio window. Every day I watch the gadwalls gliding quietly past, and the moorhens ferrying reed stems to patch up their platform in the middle. I observethe spoonbills in the field, and the great white egret stalking the frogs whose delicious cacophony of croaks thrills me at night. Even the children's sandpit holds a colony of natterjack toads. I'm a foreigner in love with this alien landscape of hugeskies and flat, damp fields. Ours is thick, brown and wavy with its crop of hay for late cutting, while the neighbour's is dotted with a few sheep and cows, and a couple of shelducks. Beyond, a line of broad black poplars marks the village road, and in the distance lies the low embankment of the Markermeer, a lake that, only 80 years ago, was sea.
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