Down there, under that, there’s a hotchpotch of highways, roads, supermarkets, shopping centres, scattered urbanisation, a quarry or two, the odd factory here and there. It’s noisy. A constant, restless, oppressive growling, edgy and unsettling. Impossible to escape, even up here in my hilltop village. It’s not somewhere I want to be. Then on some mornings, particularly in autumn and winter, the fog hunkers down on the valley floor, taking the place of the long-since dried up paleolakes. And just for a few hours, while the rumbling and grumbling of productivity continues relentlessly, temperature inversion at least allows my eyes to evade the double-edged sword of clarity.