It had been a troubled spring, tepid and pinched. The ongoingness of the war in Ukraine. Mass shootings in the US. The high cost of living. After the wettest April on record, everyone looked damp and harassed. Closer to home, there were funerals every week, among them of a young boxer killed in a car crash - “a nice gentle lad”. I thought often of all those young mourners, at an age when you shouldn’t be attending funerals of friends.

Yet the other day a cuckoo called, in blazing sunshine under a cloudless blue sky. The fields were rippled pages from an illuminated manuscript, the edges gilded and enameled in gorse and hawthorn, wild mustard and buttercup. Crouched at the verges, one could spy, underneath downy cow parsley, tiny dog violets, bush vetch, and germander speedwell: sapphires and amethysts among unfurling ferns.

Beauty had snuck into that bewitching afternoon hour, untethering me from worldly concerns, and let me loose and soaring, a house martin bound only by blue sky.

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