For the connoisseur, pushing your nose into a bale of new-season hay is one of life’s small but glorious pleasures. Horses and livestock used to eat grass in the summer, with hay kept for the dead months. Think of all the idioms involving hay and the nation’s favourite painting, ‘The Hay Wain’ by John Constable, another son of Suffolk. ‘To make hay is to make merry and also to make metaphors for our own impermanence,’ wrote Blythe. Well, there’s been nothing merry about the recent hay harvest, and boozy ‘harvest homes’ thrown by the likes of Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd are a thing of the past.