some spring thing

Yes, the spring summer thing is finally here. It's been a long winter, seems like about eight months which is odd as a season is only really supposed to last for about a quarter of a year, but there you go. We have actually had hot sunny days, and we go blinking into the daylight outside, pasty and white and soon to become the look of the lobster so favoured of the visiting touristico's.

You can always spot an imminent bank holiday and half term because the town starts filling up with vintage VW camper vans, vintage sports cars and modern expensive sportscars with the roofs down, driven by unhappy rich men with accompanying sullen teenager in the passenger seat. There's no pleasing some people; they come down here with their big fat bags of London money, buy up any house they can grab hold of and then spend the time they can get down here moping about like the unhappy miserychops that they are. The Maid and me exchanged glances with each other over the sour expression of a woman emerging from a shop with the biggest ice-cream I've ever seen, on one of the first really hot sunny day of the year. Life really is very short people, please try and enjoy yourselves.

The swifts finally arrived back, about three weeks late by my reckoning and in greatly reduced numbers, but great to hear them again with their beautiful busy screeching. Out in the hedge to the front something has nested, a blackbird possibly, and the tiny chatter of hungry chicks fills the hedgerow.

In the winter it doesn't get light here until about eight thirty in the morning, and now the sun actually insists on coming up just after four o'clock, which is the middle of the night really. The winter, although lovely, is far too long in this country and next winter I'm thinking of hitching a ride south with the birds.