The last few photos are from the region where I grew up. The outer west of flanders, Bachten de Kupe. It is flat. It is so flat you can see church spires dip below the horizon. The land is endless, and the sky is even bigger. Sparrows, seagulls, hawks, rabbits, rodents and the omnipresent cattle. And clouds, and stars.

On a clear summer night, you lie down, look up and watch yourself falling through the universe in a circular motion. People become philosophical here. In touch with the numinous.

In Veurne, a cruel heritage from Spanish catholicism is played out every year : the Penance Procession. There are carts with biblical scenes, people dressed up as Joseph, Maria, and all the saints and prophets. Behind them, farmers boys and farmers in brown cowls, leaving only holes to see through, carry heavy wooden crosses. There are even pointy hatted inquisitors, the inspiration for the KKK.

Our neighbour was an extraordinary old man. He'd sent three kids through college as a farm hand. Doing the back breaking work and not getting paid very much. A master of ditch digging. He had a garden, and his contribution to biology was a young tree he had planted upside down. The roots sprouted branches, and the branches sprouted roots. He had 5 watt lamps in his house, because that was enough to see what you said, and his Solingen potato knife was ground down to a sliver. When he read in the parochial gazette, that astronauts had landed on the moon, he declared this to be impossible : he'd seen big ladders, at a demonstration of the fire brigade, and even with the highest ladder you couldn't get up there, and in any case, the moon was much too small to walk on.

A landscape so big, the moon became small.