Mark Cocker on swallows at Claxton

DOESN'T Mark Cocker write beautifully? The author of Crow Country lives on the Wherryman's Way at Claxton and contributes to The Guardian regularly. Here's the beginning of his column in yesterday's paper:

"There were swallows over the trees. That lambent downward quick beat of their wings, which is such a signature of swallow flight, already seemed an anachronism against this autumn landscape, with its slow swirl of white-glinting gulls and the heavy crows battering towards the woods. The naturalist Max Nicholson once wrote something I always try to remember on seeing swallows, that truly they are not birds of the land. Rather their primary habitat is a thin layer of sky that lies just above the earth's surface. Swallows are before everything citizens of air."

Ok I had to look up "lambent". My Concise Oxford says "softly radiant". But then I like an author who makes me reach for my dictionary ..occasionally. Keep them coming Mr Cocker.

* Photo pinched from Wikipedia which credits Alasdair Cross
* Full article here

After the storm

A FURIOUS summer storm swept through Norfolk tonight. It was the kind that leaves a pack of Brownies screaming as the electricity fails - step forward my eldest and two dozen of her excitable mates.
But as the rain rumbled eastwards the setting sun reappeared in the west, leaving the countryside around Loddon bathed in a warm evening night. I headed up to Langley and then chased the sunset through the back roads of Claxton and Carleton St Peter - familiar enough territory for those who have done the Wherryman's Way circular walks. For a while it seemed impossible to take a bad photo - everything was in super-focus and rainbows kept appearing behind me. Reaching back twenty-five years into my A-level English Lit course I seem to remember poet Gerard Manley Hopkins calling it "blade light". That felt about right tonight. The other difference was an almost complete absence of birdsong. Perhaps they get scared - much like the Loddon Brownies.