A bunch of swallows may make the spring

With Spain moving into week 5 of the coronavirus lockdown, we’re counting our blessings here near Valencia. The chief of which is that spring seems to have come at last.

As the lockdown started, so the weather broke. For the first two or three weeks, Valencia seemed intent on making sure that the reservoirs were all full and the new growing plants well-watered. Hardly a day went by without some rain, and in many cases, several hours of the wearisome stuff.

It was as though the very heavens were weeping out of sympathy for our sad, locked-down state.

The reality, of course, is that nature is entirely indifferent to the disruption to our lives. The first hint of that was when we came downstairs one morning to a veritable racket of birdsong. Honestly, if it wasn’t deafening, it wasn’t far off.

“The housemartins are back!” I called to Danielle.

The housemartins return. And that's their nest under our porch

We went out to check, and there they were. Not just one pair, but two, apparently in some rivalry over the tidy little nest in the porch over our front door. By the end of the morning, one pair had established their property rights over it, though oddly enough they were the smaller birds of the four.

They, it seems, are going to be our guests this summer.

Well, I say our guests. I suspect from their point of view, we’re the lumbering irritants who keep coming out of the great unknown space behind their home, disturbing their peace of mind each time we do so. Still, we like to think of the nest as attached to our house, and of them as our housemartins.

They’d been there to greet us when we first moved in last year. We’d been anxiously awaiting them this year, since the beginning of March, wondering each day what had become of them. After all, the nest was right there where they’d left it, just as the architect who was overseeing the work we had done before we moved in had made clear to us.

“You can’t remove the nest,” he told us earnestly, “it’s against the law.”

We had no intention of removing it. The birds were more fun to watch than some of the TV series with which we fill our lockdown evenings. We saw the pair who were staying with us bring up not one, but two clutches of fledglings. Every time we came in, we’d see the heads sticking out of the nest, until eventually they flew off, only to be replaced within a couple of weeks by some more youngsters.

Eventually, they left us again in the autumn. Which, I feel, rather makes the point of their being guests. After all, we’re here the whole year around. They just turn up when it suits them, treating the place as a motel. I’m surprised they haven’t asked us to do their washing for them.

Anyway, they’re back. It’s said that one swallow – and housemartins are swallows – doesn’t make a summer. But there’s a whole bunch of them now, because it’s not just our house that’s received its visitors, but several of our neighbours too. And the warm weather turned up bang on cue right after them.

Which has come as a great pleasure not just to us, but to the other animals we share this house with.

Misty, now a venerable cat, who takes what pleasure he can from just watching birds and dreaming of the past when he would have quickly converted them into pleasant snacks, enjoys lying on the sun-warmed grass. Luci, the black toy poodle likes the sun too. But of all three, none is a more shining example of what it is to be a fully committed sun worshipper than the apricot toy poodle, Toffee.

She’ll share the pleasure willingly with either Misty or Luci if they care to join her. But if they don’t, that’s fine too. She just flops down on the grass in complete contentment, giving us all an object lesson in what it truly means to relax.

Toffee really understands what it is to bask in the spring sunshine
But she's happy to share it with others if they feel the inclination

Like the swallow, Toffee’s a true herald of the coming summer. Which is a welcome break from all that rain. Why, it may even make the lockdown bearable.

Fiddling for Spring

Not for the first time, we went to Wardown House, in Wardown Park, perhaps Luton’s most attractive spot, for a concert at the weekend.

I made the mistake of telling my granddaughter we were going to a concert, and she responded with some enthusiasm, ‘oh! Who are you going to see?’ That left her crestfallen when we replied that it was classical music. I have to keep reminding myself that ‘concert’ doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to different people.

This one was given by a violinist, Joanne Davis, who started off by apologising for having brought along a ‘box’ with her so she could playing backing music to her pieces. She couldn’t, she assured us, bring “the Berlin Phil” with her as there wasn’t enough space.

At least, I think she said “the Berlin Phil”, meaning the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, for which there certainly wouldn’t have been room. Note even for the orchestra, let alone an audience as well. On the other hand, she might have just said “Berlin Phil”. That, presumably, would have been an enormous man with an odd nickname, as well as extraordinary talents enabling him to play rather a lot of instruments all at the same time.

The concert was enjoyable, in a lovely setting. The rather small room (too little for her friend Berlin Phil) is attractively and tastefully laid out and decorated. It’s from the middle of the nineteenth century – what I still think of as ‘the last century’, but that only betrays my age – though the ceiling with its delicate mouldings, I couldn’t help feeling, seemed to be harking back to something rather older: the start of the century or possibly even the late eighteenth.

Wardown House Ceiling
Designed to be old-fashioned?

That would suggest that the owners of the house chose to decorate it in what was already an old-fashioned style. Suggesting that there’s nothing so old or so persistent as conservatism. Still, that’s hardly a surprising observation, is it?

The music included two pieces focusing on spring – the movement by that name from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the Beethoven Spring Sonata. As Ms Davis pointed out, her choices perhaps reflected wishful thinking: it was still cold outside and, while there were odd moments of clear sky, they were interspersed with more rain, the tail end (we hoped) of the infernally long winter we’ve been struggling through.

Joanne Davis fiddling for spring
The hat in the foreground shows at least one member of
the audience thought winter was still here (even indoors)

Well, if the music was aspirational, it worked. Because in the next couple of days spring finally arrived, and with a real flourish. The trees that had been holding back and holding back suddenly burst out. Trunks and branches that had been bare for months covered themselves in green in a matter of forty-eight hours: one could feel the impatience of nature to make up for all that wasted time.

I’m so pleased we went to that concert. Not just because it was pleasant, but because I’m sure our being there contributed to the aspirational effect it produced. In other words, I’m putting down the arrival of spring to Ms Davis having played her fiddle pieces on the season, and our being there to hear them.

And I challenge any of you to prove me wrong.

On the way to Wardown Park
Spring bursting out at last