War of the Worlds

Yesterday as I drove to work I passed a convoy of 6 huge red harvesters, headed in the direction of the village. When I got home last night I could hear them clearly, somewhere not too far away.

At midnight I took the dog out for a last wee stroll around the block before bed, and from our vantage point at the highest point in the village I watched them for a bit. They were working relentlessly up and down the fields at the bottom end of the village, at least half a mile away, maybe more. In a very dark night they worked under their own floodlights, and they lit up the field with pools of moving brightness interspersed with flashing orange beacons. Quite a sight, and for some reason it made me think of The War of the Worlds.

During the night I had to get up for some water, and I could still hear the steady drone of them - it wasn't unpleasant, but I was glad our house is up here and not down there - the noise must have been deafening.

When the alarm went off at 6am, I saw that the sky was absolutely amazing and grabbed my wee camera as Rocky and I set off out, with every intention of blipping a sky shot today, or one of the cows ambling about under the lovely pink-gold light of the rising sun. I did get loads of shots of those things, and they will have to go into a special album because I thought they were pretty good.

However, I couldn't ignore the fact that the harvesters were still going strong, having picked and stripped the fields all round the village right through the night. I'm not sure if it was peas or beans, but zooming in as close as I could from so far away in the lightening day I could see exactly how huge these things were: half the height of a telephone pole. Almost dwarfing the houses in the foreground of the picture, which are actually about a quarter mile away from them.

So, they are like a war of worlds right enough: once upon a time I suppose these crops would have been picked for the local farmers by squads of women earning a bit of extra money during the day while their children were at school. It would have been a pretty silent job, during daylight hours, and lasting several days. But now the supermarkets and frozen food producers lead the demand for vast quantities to be harvested and processed within 24 hours, meaning only these vast red giants can do the job.

And now the fields are stripped of greenery, and from my kitchen window they look bare and pillaged, and the red invaders have hit the road and moved off again to wherever they will be working tonight.

I'll have to remember this next time I pour my frozen peas into a bowl for popping into the microwave - how much I take for granted.