If you think deciduous woods perform "a striptease" each autumn, or that when sunshine falls on a hillside it "comes on like a streetlight, ping!", or that "mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns," you must say so.
It is, he thinks, frustrating that so many of the words one is compelled to use in connection with the countryside are religious: the blessing of sunshine falling through trees, the grace of cool water on blistered feet.
So, for three of the seasons, easy, familiar signifiers: sunshine, falling leaves, snow.
IHT, which stands for Interseasonal Heat Transfer, takes heat from the sunshine that falls on the tarmac playground, then stores it and releases it in the winter to heat the school.
On this perfect day when everything is ripening and not only the grapes are becoming brown, a ray of sunshine has fallen on my life: I looked behind me, I looked before me, never have I seen so many and such good things together.
A skyscraper's shadow had evenly shaded the scene all morning long, but now, at about 2 p.m., a wedge of sunshine cut across the island, falling on all but the last link in the chain of interviews.
Andrea Accomazzo said controllers were now using Rosetta to make radio "shout outs" to Philae, hoping that enough sunshine will soon fall on the lander's solar panels to reboot it: "The problem is that even if Philae hears Rosetta, it has to have enough charge to turn on its radio transmitter".
The oscillating sunshine and drizzle have epitomised the mood in the country they fall on.
When Elisabeth Fritzl was freed from her suburban dungeon in Austria two years ago amid horrific revelations of incest, rape and official incompetence, the tabloid press fell on five-year-old Felix Fritzl as a ray of sunshine to lighten the mood.
