I was startled to see so much luridly coloured synthetic string adorning bits of a hay shed, but it wasn’t hard to guess why it was there. I imagine that if you bale hay with regular hay-coloured twine, then there is always a danger that it might get lost in the feed when you cut it, and literally choke a horse. Baling with bright pink or blue or red string makes it very easy for the stablehand to separate the two, and being less wasteful in the country than city folk tend to be, these potentially useful bits of string have been kept – just in case. For me, the visual contrast between the string’s bright new plasticity and the muted and worn surroundings over which it was draped was too delicious to resist.