Nature

The lanes are full of brightly coloured little birds darting in and out of the hedges, busy nest-making. I'm sure this is a very different picture from the last few years when I bewailed the scarcity of songbirds. Little yellow bodies have been the most striking, but I don't know what they are. When I was in the prep school we used to go on nature walks through the fields towards Willian, past the decadent St Christopher's School where the co-ed boarders wore no uniforms and the boys grew their hair very long, way before the Beatles. They were forever putting Persil or something into the fountains of this garden city, which we thought was racy and everyone else found thoroughly annoying. Anyway, there were miles of meadowland, and we wrote down everything we saw in our exercise books, the birds, the fauna, the flora. Back in the classroom we would put names to what we hadn't identified, and then draw and colour them. There were lots of little yellow birds. I remember the yellowhammer and the greenfinch, and hope it is them I see now, survivers of the countryside's savage mutilation. My plans to have my hedge shortened have been put on hold for this year for fear of interfering with someone's home-building preparations.

As we walked back in the early twilight last night from our evening outing the air was filled with song. There really is not a nicer sound in the spring or summer. The chiff-chaffs have arrived - I astonished Nick by telling him this before he could tell me, and only because Simon Barnes who used to live in Nick's village reported it in his Times column. Ruth rang me earlier, ecstatic, to tell me that the huge branch of the massive old oak tree that hung over the lane towards her house and gave her palpitations in every high wind had come crashing down, missing her garden wall by inches but landing on two cars and blocking the road. The new lightness in her house was thrilling her. I've never heard her sounding so happy. Yesterday too we met Chris, a colleague, in the Victoria in Earl Soham for lunch. I assume Hugo had been in a pub before, but this being Easter Monday and the place packed was a challenge. He rose to it though, eventually settling down beside my chair after he'd licked a toddler's ear and sniffed a few passing bottoms. But somehow he kept turning his rear end into the path of passing people, and I was terrified that his tail or a paw would get trodden on. Everyone stepped over him and stopped to admire him, and he took it all in his stride. As we left he dropped a present right in the middle of the lawn before I could stop him and, horror of horrors, I had no bags in my pocket. He was the only dog there. We're marked now. We can never return.