Not all the sugar beet around Berthem is heading off to the refineries. We came across this lovely bunch early this morning, munching away at a trough of beets. There was something, we agreed, almost biblical about the scene. Though it doesn’t come across in the photo I took, the calves were arranged around the trough in a way reminiscent of the table in Da Vinci’s Last Supper. There was a sort of madness in their eyes and in the chomping, dribbling mouths and there was, above all, a constant and very loud sound of munching. Elsewhere, we saw plenty of pheasants (I read somewhere that an English fish-and-chip shop is selling deep-fried pheasants’ breasts, so plentiful have they become) and – something rather special – a completely white heron. It was not, I am convinced, an egret, but a heron. Now, I know white heron do exist in Australasia, but in Europe? Could it have been an albino? I hope somebody will put me right.