I sheltered beneath a large field maple tree, reframing my atti- tude to rain. Parking the grumbles and persuading myself instead how gleaming clean all the trees looked. Appreciating the gun-barrel-gran- ite skies. Remembering that a day in the rain is better than a day in the office. That kind of thing.

One of my favourite smells is the air after a storm, the earthy scent of petrichor, from the Greek words petros (stone) and ichor (the blood of the gods). We tend to think that our sense of smell is something to be sniffed at compared with the animal world’s, but we are astonishing- ly adept at detecting geosmin, the chemical released by dead microbes that is responsible for the heady smells of petrichor and pools of water. We can smell geosmin at a level of five parts per trillion – that’s thou- sands of times more sensitive than sharks are to the scent of blood. We may be so sensitive to it because detecting water on the savannah where we evolved was a vital evolutionary advantage.

I had a free morning and my latest grid square lay before me, begin- ning with the rare pleasure of a segregated cycle lane, safe from the busy road that sliced the square in half. I rode fast and free, blasting away the day’s earlier frustrations of waiting on the phone for an hour to speak to my electricity provider. Free at last! (Me, not the electric- ity.) North of the road, wheat fields ripened in the heat. South of the road lay a 1940s housing estate. The noisy road was once an important Roman route, though it was already an ancient thoroughfare by the time they arrived. I can’t begin to imagine what the traffic here will look like in another 2,000 years.

A row of houses had been built recently between the road and those wheat fields that had been forest back when the Romans carved through this land in the name of progress. The new-builds were extrav- agant expanses of glass and steel, with large gravel areas for parking multiple cars. Sparrows jostled noisily in pink rose bushes and pet- als fell among the squabbling. A placard in one garden campaigned

Meadows

against a ‘green belt grab’ that proposed to build 4,000 more homes around here. It summed up the difficulties of deciding where to build. This family was enjoying their new home but understandably didn’t want all the neighbouring fields to be built on as well. I don’t like the countryside being turned into towns, but I also want everyone to have a home. Answers on a postcard to your MP, please.

The map promised waterfalls. I was not expecting the 979 metres of Venezuela’s Angel Falls (named after the American explorer and pilot Jimmy Angel, whose plane crashed on Auyán-Tepuí in 1937), the volume of Inga Falls in the DRC (more than 46 million litres per second), or even the Denmark Strait cataract (an undersea waterfall plummeting unseen for 3,500 metres beneath the Atlantic Ocean). But the word ‘waterfall’ was not something I had expected to see annotated on my suburban lowland map, so I was excited to investigate.

My heart sank when I saw that the stream ran straight across a golf course. Golf courses are like a certain type of model. At first glance, your eyes light up at the swathes of undulating lushness. But your passion quickly plummets at the emptiness you find, the lack of nature beneath an artificial, preened veneer. The golf course did not bode well for my waterfalls.