Seduced by its fleeting beauty, generations of artists, painters, and poets have tried to capture the light, particularly during the ‘Golden hour,‘ just after sunrise or just before sunset. We choose to cycle into the light and are therefore captured by it. 

Sunlight manifests a new vibrant quality in summer, active and excitable, like a restless child smothering every available surface with an exorbitant golden lustre. Here in France, that first blush of summer’s morning light casts an egg-yolk yellow glow over a subdued landscape, gifting all it touches with a brief, stark, amber-infused paint job.

The strength of light in summer has a lot to do with trigonometry and mathematics, as the Earth’s axis tilts the Sun sits higher in the sky, creating a sharper angle that means sunlight passes through a smaller section of Earth’s atmosphere concentrating its energy over a lesser area, making the light more intense.

Light can be deceptive too, especially when you’re older, colour blind, short-sighted, and wearing prescription transition lenses. Through my eyes, a dull brown farmhouse becomes a vivid crimson castle, while green and blue merge to create shimmering turquoise trees; as with any mirage, I see things that aren’t really there. 

Cycling into this magical colour palette, I view enormous farm sprinklers spraying rainbows over ripe corn crops filled with plump, topaz-tinted ears. Onyx-hued blackberries glisten from spiked snaking vines, their sweet jewels worthy of the scratches, meanwhile buttery-coloured French Comice pears, soft to the touch, offer little resistance to outstretched hands.

Early morning light is said to be the best antiseptic, helping to heal the various cuts, scratches, and bruises that seem to accompany our bicycle travels, also triggering the production of Vitamin D in the body. The fact that sunlight travels 150 million kilometres from the Sun to sustain me and all life on Earth only adds to its mystical quality. Is it any wonder civilisations past and present worship the Sun? 

Light heals but never lies. I’m sun-kissed but with skin crinkled like a discarded crushed-up brown paper bag. 

Sitting outside approaching sunset, the sky begins to darken as the solar eclipse takes hold, the moon is blocking out the sun just above the horizon or perhaps it’s just another trick of the light.