Swallows

I don't like it when the swallows start perching on vantage points like the telegraph lines and the tops of the builders' scaffolding. It means they're feeling a change in the air - cooler, longer nights, a heavy dew across the fields at dawn, glistening spiders' webs blanketing the gorse bushes.

The summer of 2024, with such warmth as it has brought, is ending. Autumn is at the door and, here in the north, the cold will come soon. The swallows, along with the martins and swifts, have a different season to find, either the summer season of the southern hemisphere, if they go that far south, or the equinoctial regime of equatorial lands.

As a small boy in Kenya I used to see the swallows in the months either side of the new year. This is the season of the Kaskazi, the NE trade wind, which includes a hot, dry season between December and March. So, later, between the ages of nine and sixteen, while I spent the winter at school in England, the swallows were enjoying Kenya's warmth.

I'd see them again when they arrived in England in the spring, knowing that this was a signal that I would soon be tracing their tracks south to spend the eight weeks of my summer holiday on the glorious Kenya coast.

Now, each year when they leave, I wonder whether I will see them again in the spring.