Where I walked in fields of gold

THE first of May, a cold, wet day, a grey sky and trees still leafless across the field.

After spending a sunny week with our son and his family in the Czech Republic, we had dashed across the tarmac at Cork airport the night before in driving rain. The Bohemian Rhapsody was over. But it turned out that May 2 was a beautiful day.

However, that same morning, on a train to Linz in Austria — thence to fly to Stansted and thence to Cork — we had passed through countryside baking in the sun. The ploughed fields lay brown and dry beneath a cloudless sky. Vast pastures were so densely carpeted with flowering dandelions that I asked myself if they were grown as a fodder crop. Maybe in Czech and Austria — as in parts of the USA — the idea of cropping them had been adopted.