“I have looked at that particular painting many times,” I said. “It is a wonderful scene, beautifully rendered by an artist at the peak of his artistic powers. It is exquisite. I can’t expect you to understand its sublimity.”

“Sublimity! Christ!”

“Yes, sublimity.”

The thief went back over to the painting and pointed at it.

“First of all, this piece of paper with a few watered-down daubs of colour on it is anything but sublime,” he said. “In fact, if you think carefully about what it represents, it can be seen to be the immoral and pernicious piece of shit it really is.”

“How so?”

The burglar shrugged impatiently.

“It’s a landscape, right? Nothing at all wrong with landscapes. Nothing all that wrong with watercolours either. But it’s a representation – a copy – of a piece of land that belongs to a farmer – in other words, to a government. It’s a depiction of two fields divided by a chalk path. Two fields. A chalk path. You see. Not nature, but a man-made, artificial piece of countryside. Staked out, planned, ploughed, tilled, sown, harvested, left fallow for a year. Bought. Taxed. Insured. Protected by the legal system. All pedestrian rights of way barred. Trespassing laws – updated enclosure laws – enforced and adhered to. Walk on it without permission and you’ll get a shotgun blasted at you. All legal and above board, of course.

“Man-made, you see. Not – by any stretch of the imagination – natural, meaning as nature intended it. This is how a farmer intended it to look. Man-made. A chalk path – the chalk traces all that remain from what was probably once a quarry – blasted and mined into early extinction – dragged piece by piece in chunks to the nearest road – the one the “artist” was standing on, and the one we as viewers are made to stand on too – and then shipped to a milling factory – just so that a few teachers in provincial schools could scribble on a board in order to enforce those laws. A few left over, broken-off, useless pieces of chalk trodden into the ground by underpaid labourers wearing worn-down work boots, forming a path of pain that leads – directly – to and from their place of work.

“Not public property, but private ownership of land – which takes us right back to feudal times, when enclosure and serfdom were considered to be socially acceptable. It’s a painting in mourning for the kind of scene that no one has access to from his or her windows anymore because of land ownership and the destruction that accompanies it.