My bicycle hums while it carries me through the late morning air, already heavy with the promise of intense late summer's heat.

We're on our usual round: left at the ultramarine blue bench, down into the meadow, past the house with the huge almond tree, wonderful summer flowers and wine crawling all over the shed - a spectacle of colours any time of year.
Then through the crooked country path lined by ancient oaks, forgotten medieval cobble stone peeking through the trodden down ground here and there.

We greet the four horses where the oak path ends, and where a plaque tells a tale of the hidden folk giving gifts. One horse is dappled grey, one black, one chestnut, one white and brown. Three of them come to the fence every time, the black one always stays back.

Along the outer edge of Peckatel, village with one of the smallest half-timber chapels in Europe, then past the Fox's Pond, which is indicated by a large sign educting about Vulpes Vulpes, the common red fox. It also has a hut for picnicking, and is peculiarly situated in the middle of some fields, the one in the front dedicated to blooming plants meant to feed the local insects. Sunflowers everywhere.

Then along the street with the high hedges on both sides. Sometimes the red kites fly circles over the farms at this point. Sometimes the giant red cows and their numerous playful calfs graze behind the left side.

Here, the hedge is not mounted on a bank of earth, but growing over a trench, as often in this county, with its glittering lines of water cutting through everywhere.
We whir by, and a breeze carries with it the shockingly cold air from the wet darkness inside the hedge, welcome in the growing heat.

We drive 45 minutes to "our" beach, which, in this outbreak of summer, is packed with people. The water is shallow for such a wide strip of water, that this beach is very popular with parents, and a hospital for mothers is also nearby.

Three rows of sandbanks follow the shallows, the emptier of people the farther out we swim, crossing the cold, deep ditches of seegrass to get to the next area we can stand in.

Today the water is so still it mirrors the silvery far horizon sky, blurring The Line. I hold my breath, staying still on the surface, all limbs akimbo, goggles allowing me to look down. "Dead man", the wrong way around.
The sunlight hits the golden sand below me in a slowly undulating pattern of crisscrossing actual I'm-not-making-this-up rainbows. The sky above my back is deeply perfectly blue with whispers of cirrus, and the water carrying me over the rainbow-adorned gold dust is bottle green and crystal clear.

I am swiftly carried over the sand by a current I cannot see, but I can hear it below, the sea being so very silent otherwise.
It sounds like a cold breeze.

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