Sometimes I just need to sit outside in the sun and look at what’s in front of me. Currently that means looking at the wonderful crop of poppies in our garden.

Frustratingly, my photographs just don’t do the colour of these poppies justice.

They are of course wonderful in their own right, but I also value them because their colour in shifting light comes close to two other particular rich reds. On one hand to the extraordinary deep red of old stained glass windows found in a cathedral like Chartres. The other is the red of a particular type of old-fashioned waxed paper bag. I used to get one of these whenever I bought small items like screws from a hardware shop just off the Tottenham Court Road that I used to visit when I had a makeshift studio in that part of London many years ago.