The enormous weight of three hundred and sixty-five days once again slips from my hand and falls down into the dark cavern of the past. The windows to this room are wide open. How improbably strange the sky, draped in a sheet of dense grey clouds looks behind the luxuriant green trees. It seems someone has filled space itself with a sweet, melancholic beauty. A cool breeze has finally started to blow, after much heat and sun. Could it be the East Wind? Papers and books lie in a disorderly pile before me on the desk. I suddenly stop writing, screw the cap back on the fountain pen and clip it to my collar – not because the weather is absolutely delightful and the grapevine is maddeningly beautiful and one simply cannot write a book on dairy-farming in a setting so entirely out of this world. One cannot discuss the significance of the chemical components of milk any more than one can expound on the proper proportion of corn husk and mustard oil-cake in the cattle feed. All right, not another word about cows or water buffalo.