Yellow Fever

There's something synesthetic about the oil seed rape season; I can smell and taste yellow. The stunning fluorescent patchwork is an unctuous smog that makes me want to hold my breath as I walk or drive past it every day. I carry it home on my clothes and hair. To try to escape it I shove my hair under a cap and decide to dry my laundry indoors for the next few weeks.

There seems to be more of this crop than ever this year. A trend for cold-pressed, artesan, single-estate quality has ousted olive oil from British kitchens. Local and healthy, it has less saturated fat and a higher smoke point. I followed a suggestion and made mayonnaise from it, but that was a mistake; the finished product is too much like the living thing, in the same way that goat's cheese has the startling smell and taste of nibbling, bleating, hairy goat. (I like goat's cheese - probably because I'm allergic to oil seed rape but not goat). There's a theory that eating local honey is an antidote to hayfever. I buy honey from my village where the honeybee's waggledance points to a proliferation of oil seed rape flowers in every direction.

I've made my annual pilgrimage to see the cowslips on Magog Down. (I wrote about them in this blog last year). The soft yellow of the wildflowers is so much more subtle than the crop blazing away on the horizon. Tractor track lines lead down through the fields of rape towards the two-fingered salute of the Addenbrooke's hospital incinerator chimney. Patients with thick heads, itchy eyes, sore throats and throbbing sinus await their allergy clinic referrals.

Tomorrow I plan to go out on horseback to look for pasque flowers. I have a dream that a fragile few have returned to local chalk grassland.