REFLECTIONS ON HAY

The heavy rain on Sunday had churned the drive into the Hay Festival car park into a rich red mud. By the time we had crossed the field and entered the site a fair bit of it was still attached to our shoes. The Festival was in full swing, this being the bank holiday, the events sold out. Bigger than ever seemed the tent city, complete with those vertical flags that seem to have come from the Mongolian steppes. And everywhere hordes of people. Wherever do they all come from, I hear myself thinking?

I love the Hay Festival for it is an easy, forgiving sort of place where the more eccentrically you dress the more intelligent you are deemed to be. As someone who has never mastered the essential elements of looking smart I am in my element. I am windblown, dressed in a suede coat with mock fur (it was very windy) my shoes covered in mud. Thus I stumble into the administration offices in search of tickets to hear the war correspondent, Patrick Coburn, being interviewed by Rosie Boycott about his Baghdad experiences.

I am loosely attached to some minor UNESCO Committee or other and, rather at my suggestion, I'm afraid, we were supposed to be sponsoring Patrick's talk but somewhere along the line the wires became crossed and we found that we weren't after all. Someone else had got in before us, or after us. Usually sponsorship is so desperately sought after that it is a surprise to find that it has become a species of competitive event. Still, the organisers had apologised and gamely said we could have our ticket allocation. The only trouble was that no one could find these tickets allegedly endorsed for our benefit.

'Never mind, we have briefed the steward' someone said mysteriously.

So under her beady eye, we go and sit in the sponsor's seats, all five of us, wondering who we might have displaced, when who should arrive with another party but Simon Scharma, - the charismatic tele-historian. He of the doom-laden voice. Oh dear, I thought.

But I needn't have worried. The stewards quickly ushered the Scharma party into some casual chairs (perhaps meant for us) set randomly at the side of the auditorium and the show began. Tee-hee, I thought, I shall never be able to look at him again without thinking of the time I pinched his seat.

Patrick Coburn has been travelling the Middle East since 1978. He got into Bagdad just before the invasion and has stayed there, on and off, for much of the time since. He was lucid, incisive and presented a horrifying picture of daily life in Iraq in the years following the invasion. He ground no axes, just told the tale of what he saw and tried to explain some of the tribal, religious and political complexities.

Rosie Boycott adeptly set him talking. (I was relieved to see that she also had decided that the windblown, hedge-backwards look was in vogue at this year's Festival). Much of what he said appears in his book, called simply 'The Occupation,' copies of which he signed in the bookshop after the event.

I'm a sucker for signed copies. Authors usually made a great fuss when doing this, but he signed mine with little more than a grunt of acknowledged thanks when I said that I had enjoyed his talk. Maybe he thought me a sycophant.

But I had wanted to ask him why? Not why he might dread sycophants but why he should choose of his own free will to report from surely the most dangerous place for journalists in the world. What drives him, I wonder, other than a secret and cruel death wish?

When I got home I went for a long walk to reflect. Arriving at the top the old Roman road my path was blocked by a car in which a young couple appeared engaged in vigorous copulating operations. What they thought they were doing in such a public spot on a Bank Holiday I have no idea. They couldn't have been local.

Still I guess we've all been there at some time in our lives so I made an elaborate pretence of looking at the ground and by taking the far path managed to avoid passing the car too closely and instead skirted the copse on the far side.

Partly I was considering how I might save some money from the incessantly increasing household budget, which left to its own devices for the past few months has expanded skywards with enthusiasm. How can I cut back our expenditure? Well, one thing, I suppose, might be to stop buying author-signed books at £15.99 a throw. But then I do so love books. It's always like that isn't it?

MY WEEK - WALNUTS, HONEY BUT NO WINE

Tree
Each morning I go to look at the little walnut sapling I brought back from the Auverne. Having survived being uprooted from the old tin bath in which it had germinated, the journey back to Blighty wrapped in sacking, and being over-wintered in some very acid compost, which rotted away its few remaining roots, I finally planted it on the lawn as part of the recent gardening operations, where it now stands like an accusing finger.

This week - we are in late May - it put out its first tentative shoot, low down on what one day may be called a trunk. Well, walnuts are not the earliest of birds.

What is curious is that the shoot - completely formed with leaves - is so small that you almost need a magnifying glass to see it. Even on my twig like tree it is disproportionately miniature - like those infant arms that bud out of the mighty chest of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Moreover, despite my daily coaxing the shoot shows no sign of actually getting any bigger. Other buds are bursting now; I wait with anxiety to see whether they will produce anything bigger. I do hope it grows - for I have pledged it as part of the 'Plant a Billion Trees' campaign. My (very little) bit to help save the planet.

Regime
I am on a new regime - I have forsaken my usual welcome glass with my supper and replaced it with water. This is a great sacrifice.

But having again put on a few pounds in as many days on my recent trip to France, I felt I had to do something drastic. I have always found alcohol to be a great appetiser and after a glass or two I am always hungrier than before.

So after a week of drinking fizzy water what has happened? Well, the weight has come down (a bit) but the biggest change has been an absence of that bloated feeling after eating: the feeling that someone has opened a valve in your feet and your energy has just poured out on the floor.

Usually after supper, I just want to relax, to read the paper or just potter about in the garden. Anything else demands real effort. Now I have regained that energy. Last night I was out cutting the grass until almost dusk.

Funny how these things creep up on you. Alcohol (in moderation) never used to have the effect of knocking me out - of leaving me feeling zonked - especially when I've had a hard day. If suddenly you started feeling zonked after a couple of glasses, you would, I suppose, stop immediately. But when the effect is gradual and irregular you simply accept it as normal. I suppose its age.

I don't intend to give up completely. We have a big barbecue planned on Saturday to celebrate the made-over garden. I shall make sure I indulge then. Wouldn't want to lose the habit after all.

Farm Shop
There's a new Farm Shop just opened in the lovely Vale village of Peterston-super-Ely. J and I have been over there a couple of times. It is full of lovely produce: locally grown vegetables, some of them organic, that remind me of the market gardens of my childhood. They also make quite gorgeous ice cream, marketed under the 'Wild Fig' brand, which left me thinking at first that their display must be very dull with only one flavour. Not true of course, and there are tables to sit outside in the sunshine while you eat it.

But the loveliest things in the whole shop are the jars of honey. For £28 you can buy a great Winnie-the-Pooh size pot of honey. The pot is glass (so you can see there is honey all the way down) and has a great honeycomb in it. The honey inside is a glorious amber through which the sunlight filters and refracts like a crystal. There must be at least a kilo of honey in each pot - but I could never dip into it; the honey pot is simply far too beautiful. Now all I need is £28.

THE CHESHIRE CAT MAY VANISH BUT HIS PHILOSOPHY STAYS

Why is it, do you suppose, that though our bodies seem to age with increasing rapidity every year, our minds seem set to a biological cycle altogether? Having advanced already into the silver age of the bus pass, concessions at the theatre and free prescriptions, I find my mind and outlook little different to how they seemed in my early thirties.

Like most of us, I suppose, I live in a dissonant world of thinking I am thirty years younger than I really am. Until, of course, I look in the mirror or wardrobe or spend a day twisting and bending in the garden. Then I start moaning and complaining. The mind may be strong but its corporeal reality is weak. Can anything be done to stop the body ageing twice as fast as the mind?

I was pondering this philosophical question the other day, relaxing in the sunshine after what had seemed a particularly hard session in the garden, when a smiling face appeared over the garden wall. It belonged to my neighbour's thirty-something son, Philip, who had been visiting his Mum.

As my garden is elevated, the wall in question is a retaining wall. Philip's grinning head therefore appeared at lawn level, disembodied and looking like a species of Cheshire Cat. Though he was standing and I reclining I still had to look down at him.

Philip is a musician and one of the most optimistic and even-tempered people I know.
Some years ago he invited me to his wedding - a curious affair conducted to a pagan ritual - somewhere up in the mountains of North Wales. The ceremony took place in a woodland glade to which we all marched, chanting, behind a bizarre battery of pipes and drums.

Everyone was dressed in their best finery - well, this was a wedding - but in costumes loosely based on 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' We were a fantastic collection of Titiania's and Oberon's, Pyramus and Thisbe's, elves and fairies, with an assortment of Tudor monarchs thrown in for good measure.

Making use of bridegroom's privileges, Philip himself appeared as Mozart in a splendid eighteenth century frock coat and breeches and thus was he joined with his Hippolyta, while we tied ribbons to the trees roundabout, some of which may even be there to this day.

At the party afterwards we drank mead, I seem to remember, rather than wine and ate off wooden platters and a very good time was had by all. It must have been the most memorable wedding I have ever attended. Sadly the couple have since parted, though in the spirit of that eclectic gathering they remain friends.

When he's not composing or teaching Philip likes to explore, trekking over the Andes and similar inhospitable places. I reminded him of this as I lay aching in my chair. "I feel as if I have just climbed to Machu Picchu," I groaned.

But Philip just smiled. "Do you know", he said, "the first day of trekking I did feel just like that. With altitude sickness, a headache, aching limbs, I just wanted to go home. But then I thought that I shouldn't be moaning. Instead I should remember how lucky I was to be amongst such scenery. Rather than feel weary and miserable I told myself I should feel grateful for the privilege of being allowed to do be there. And as soon as I was able to make that mental shift, from complaining to feeling grateful and privileged, then suddenly I had more energy and the pain went away."

He laughed a little. His face at the level of my feet almost made him seem like a little Buddha. And I thought, "of course, he's right." We do all complain so much that we forget to remember how lucky most of us are.

So maybe this is the way to stop the body ageing quite so fast: to feel grateful for what we have, rather than to complain about what we have not; to be grateful for the garden and the sunshine rather than the aches and the pains and the cost.

His face disappeared, like the Cheshire Cat. In Alice's tale the Cat vanishes but the grin remains. In this case Philip's smiling head disappeared, but, as you can see from this tale, his philosophy hasn't.

THE FISHY TALE OF THE NORMANDY LEMON

What is the world coming to when you go to France for the weekend to see some very old friends and all you can find to write about that is remotely unusual is a fish swimming on its nose.

Admittedly it was a very fine fish. I am no expert but I think it possibly bore a connection to the Carp family. And it was swimming in the clear water of a pleasant moat attached to a manor house set amid rolling Normandy orchards, full of apple trees and those lumbering Norman cows of mottled brown.

As it happened we were on our way from Le Havre to Honfleur via the scenic route that crosses the Seine over the Pont de Tancarville, which had just opened when first I came to France almost 50 years ago and on which, as a homesick fourteen year old I was made to compose my first ever French 'essay.'

But back to the fish that swam on its nose. We first noticed it by its great tail, standing proud of the water, swishing slowly from side to side. Gradually it criss-crossed the moat in methodical manner, head down as if searching for someone's car keys. Never, I thought, have I watched such seemingly ordered behaviour in a fish.

I will not say anything about Honfleur, except that it seems full of shops selling expensive art of dubious quality. If you really want to know about Honfleur no doubt Wikepedia has a very fine entry on the subject. Though I will say that this was the port from which Champlain sailed one April day in 1608 to found the sad and forsaken city of Quebec, from where, in a sort of migration in reverse, one of my ancestors is thought to have come.

At the inevitable dinner on Saturday night - long even by French standards - we celebrated both my birthday and that of my host and wondered how France might fare under its new boot camp President. Everyone there seemed to have voted for Ségolène Royal and were consequently in something of a 'we wuz robbed' mood. The unanimity and the passion rather surprised me, as did the widely held belief that many French women had actually refused to vote for her on the grounds of gender.

Maybe things will have moved on in five years time for I must confess to having become, from the comfortable distance of this side of the Channel, something of a Ségo fan. In the meantime, perhaps, lest I inflame the passions of our Gallic contingent, I shall revert again to the Normandy countryside.

For it can't have been far from where the giant fish splashed lazily about in its moat that one of Fennie's greatest fabrications was concocted a few years ago as we hurried through lower Normandy en route to catch the ferry. Sharing our car was a young woman in her twenties, the friend of a friend who, for a reason now lost in the mists of time, we were escorting back to Blighty.

"Are those orange trees?" asked Harriet, feigning an interest in the foliage of some passing orchard.

"I don't think oranges grow in Normandy," I said politely.

"Oh." Harriet seemed so disappointed that I felt driven to compensate.

"But of course, they might have been lemons," I hazarded.

"Lemons?" Harriet's interest quickened, but then a note of doubt crept in. "But these looked orange."

"That's quite possible," I said getting into my stride. "The best Normandy lemons do have an orange tinge. It's the soil here you see - gives them their special flavour."

Harriet wasn't wholly convinced. "But I've never seen Normandy lemons in the shops," she said.
It was time for boldness. "Haven't you?" I exclaimed, and by now well into my fictional stride I continued, "But I suppose that's not altogether improbable. You see they are much sought after and the season is very short and there aren't many left over by the time the top restaurants in Paris have taken their share."

And so in this vein did the conversation continue like a sketch from Monty Python with me deploying one outrageous reason after another to explain why she had neither seen nor heard of these lemons with their magical taste and culinary properties.

In the end I longed for the penny to drop; for her to say ruefully but playfully "You've been winding me up." But sound of dropping pennies came there none.

And so, if somewhere, someday, you should meet a personable young woman who tries to persuade you that the zest of an orange tinted Normandy lemon represents the supreme jewel in the citrus crown, you may safely lay the blame at Fennie's door.

THE UN-BIRTHDAY PRESENT

I have at last stepped out of the shower, dried my hair with a generous dollop of Frizz Ease and donned a green silk shirt - a most appropriate colour in view of the weekend's events. Talced and perfumed I begin to feel human again.

A blog or two ago we were discussing Saki. In a flight of fancy, I said that sometimes I imagined the great Edwardian storyteller sitting in my office, scribbling languidly while I hammered at the laptop keys. I have learnt my lesson. I have paid the price for this piece of lèse-majesté. Never, gentle reader, invoke the spirit of Saki in fun.

One of his best known stories is The Unrest Cure - a tale of a prematurely middle- aged cleric whose life is fossilised by underwork. Saki reasons, quite logically, that if overwork calls for a Rest Cure, then underwork demands an Unrest Cure.

What the Unrest Cure was I shall leave you to find out. The collected stories of Saki makes a wonderfully entertaining gift and you can always ready a few of them surreptitiously before the wrapping up process begins.

In my case Saki evidently must have thought me particularly burdened with gifts and reckoned it about time I had an Un-Birthday Present to compensate.

The present started out auspiciously enough. I was told to expect, not the usual book, scarf or antique print, but a 'surprise.' So, anyway, my darling children announced. I was even ordered to set aside two days of the bank holiday for the purpose.

Fennie's mind raced. Whatever could this be? - a trip to London to see a show? Thirty-six hours on a canal barge? Or, still on the water theme, some serious pampering amid the steam rooms and jacuzzis of the new Bath spa?

Needless to say the surprise was none of these. When hands a-tremble I opened the envelope I found a two-day makeover of the garden by the aged thirty-something children and their partners.

The plan had the unmistakable imprint of Elder Daughter, who inspired by Charlie Dimmock, is well now on her way to becoming the Delia Smith of the nation's greenery.

So far so good: they even clubbed together to put some money in the 'pot' to buy plants, compost, gravel, trellising.

But any idea that Fennie might have had of simply putting her feet up with a glass of celebratory wine and the Sunday papers, while the family ground force team swung into action was rapidly to prove illusory. No, it was made very clear that I was to work, too.

It also soon became clear that the estimates on which the children's 'pot' had been based fitted their aspirations no better than the Government's when they bid for the Olympics. Fennie was soon digging deep into her bank account for ever increasing and unbudgeted sums to feed the growing appetite of the project.

Goodness, I haven't done as much physical work since assisting brother-in law to move a milking parlour from Norfolk to Shetland in the mid-seventies. Even by the end of the first day, the project was showing discernible characteristics of being an Un-Birthday Present.

For if a birthday present involves other people spending money while you relax and enjoy for a day or two the benefit of their well-chosen purchases, then an Un-Birthday Present entails the reverse: not only do you work rather than relax but you pay handsomely for the drudgery as well.

Saki had even marshalled the elements to ensure a proper ambience, whipping up a high and gusting wind laced with a soaking drizzle, just in case gardening in the warm spring sunshine might be sneekily enjoyable.

Fortunately, the rain later abated to allow a snatched barbecued lunch - snatch being the operative word for the wind still gusted fiercely, plucking the salad leaves from your fork and hurling them back to the lettuce bed in some forlorn attempt, I suppose, at restoring their status quo ante.

In wax jacket and muddy boots, with aching limbs and hair coiffed beautifully by wind and rain into the latest cave woman style, I gradually became, nevertheless, the owner of a fabulous new garden.

By the time the gang had packed their tools away and hurried home I found myself left with gravel and pots and trellising and climbing plants; a new flowerbed blossomed on what previously had been bare tarmac, hanging baskets framed the front door. Even the dull brown garden shed reappeared in a new fetching sky blue outfit.

All very nice. But oh, the cost and the tiredness and the aching body and the mud tramped into carpets throughout the house. Fennie is not planning on having any more birthdays in a hurry. Bah-humbug! Another Un-Birthday Present could kill me.

BUT FOR MAXWELL I MIGHT NEVER HAVE PASSED 'A' LEVEL PHYSICS

There are lots of experiences in life about which you can afterwards say 'that was my first'. These are the transitions in life where what you have read about, or seen in films, suddenly becomes real. Your first job is just such a transition and I was reminded of this by watching the truly excellent film drama about Robert Maxwell on BBC2 last week.

The story is compelling. The man whose parents die in Auschwitz, who starts life with nothing, not even a pair of shoes. Who learns the most impeccable accent with the correctest of accents and who later amasses a fortune by sheer will and bluster.

The film was also a tour de force for David Suchet, who played Maxwell. Though as David Suchet is now so type cast as Agatha Christie's famous detective I felt it was Poirot playing Maxwell, rather than Suchet and that at any moment the famous upturned moustaches would sprout anew on the scowling Maxwell face like a species of weed.

Plenty of course regard Maxwell as a deceiving crook who robbed a great many people of their pensions. I do not dissent from the general judgement. Fortunately my world and his did not collide in the later stages of his life. But in my early years I had considerable reason to be grateful to Maxwell, for he gave me my first real job.

I am stretching a point. The great man - for such he already was - did not exactly appoint me personally to the temporary holiday cover position of Gestetner operator in the print shop at Headington Hall, in Oxford. But one of his minions, or his minions' minions must have done and so, one sunny day some forty years ago, I found myself on the Maxwell payroll.

Nor, if we are being strictly accurate, was this my first paid employment. Our neighbouring farmer used to let me drive his old Fordson tractor and work on the bailing sledge for an initial wage, I seem to remember of less than a shilling an hour.

But the Maxwell job was the first in which I had to dress up, at least semi smartly, and turn up at a set hour, fussing over stencils and correction fluid while the machine sat atop a table and rocked gently to the movement of its large and inky roller. If all went well the sheets of print - the machine demanded paper of blotting paper absorbency - flew into a tray at the bottom.
I suppose I must be one of the few people left on this earth qualified to operate such a machine. Even the verb 'to roneo' - after Gestetner's great rival Roneo - and meaning to run off a number of copies on a duplicating machine - has vanished into the oubliette of the archaic.

The Gestetner's nemis - the Xerox - sat just across the print room floor. And occasionally, I was allowed to operate it. All it took to operate the Xerox was a press of the button, though because the technology was then new and scarcely reliable an engineer had to be on almost permanent stand-by.

The beige machine was as big as a desk and when working emitted a eerie green light from under the vinyl flap where the documents to be copied were placed, which gave it the look of a refugee from an early science fiction movie.

It also smelt - not an unpleasant smell - but a kind of burning chemical miasma arose whenever it was in use. Sometimes this became all too real and the precious photostat emerged charred and smouldering at the edges.

I never met Maxwell during that stint, though it seems I just missed him on more than one occasion, for he had the habit of dropping in unannounced at the outposts of his empire. Nor did I ever meet him subsequently at the establishment he opened just across Magdalen Bridge, known universally as 'Maxwell's.'

This was a most wonderful emporium: from a first floor devoted to academic books you descended by a wide spiral staircase to a basement that was half coffee shop and half record boutique.

It seemed the height of sophistication then in those days to tuck myself up with a book and a nine-penny cup of coffee brewed by an ultra-modern Expresso machine and listen to the adjacent sounds of music.

Before my 'A' Levels I would sometimes retreat there to revise, if I had any time to kill. In particular I associate physics - my weakest subject by a mile - with Maxwell's coffee house. I must have lost myself in the dark corner under the spiral staircase many times while trying to ponder the mysteries of gravity and optics.

Not maybe the best chosen place for revision, you may think, nevertheless, I passed.

STRESS AND UNSTRESS

Several articles in the papers this week invite us to say whether we are Type A or Type B when it comes to organising our day. Type A people rush around in a frenzy, apparently, like the White Rabbit, constantly checking the time and hyperventilating if they become caught in a queue.

Type B people, on the other hand, are much more laid back. They drift through their days with the principal object of keeping out of the way of the Type As, though not always with great success.

I confess to being a bit of both. Much of the time I am rushing around, but then I get distracted and disappear into a world of my own for half an hour, thus necessitating a further stressful bout of Type A activity to catch up. As in so much else, I am a mixture; indeed, I sometimes wonder why I wasn't christened 'Trifle.'

It was to recover from these bouts of stress that I first started going to Anne. She is an aromatherapist of the highest order and now a close friend. Some of my happiest moments have been spent stretched out on Linda's couch, anointed with Lemon Grass or Bergamot while she pummels, prods and skilfully massages me from head to foot.

She chides me gently - yesterday it was for leaving specks of nail polish in the crevices of my toenails - and we quizz each other about our various ailments, hers sadly real, mine mostly imagined. She has had an outbreak of arthritis; her hands inflamed. Not a happy position for someone whose livelihood depends on the suppleness of those probing fingers.

I promise to lend her my book 'A Doctor's Home Cure for Arthritis' - bought, I tell her, in anticipation of contracting the infliction that has befallen so many relatives.

Afterwards, contrary to best practice, she always insists I take a glass of wine. Anne is rather devoted to her wine and has the best cellar (if indeed it can be called that for she keeps it in racks that grow like triffids up the walls of her kitchen) of anyone I know.

"It's Californian," she says, a little apologetically, "I don't think it's very good."

"All wines are good," I countered. "It's just that some are better than others."

Yet it was true. The wine, though silky smooth, had the pneumatic body of a Bay Watch starlet and a corresponding shallowness of character. For me, wine made by English speakers is always, at bottom, uninteresting.

On the way back, I pass my neighbour, also a keen thespian, watering away in the gathering dusk. The beautiful scent of lilac wafts out of the tree by her gate. I tell her I am trying for the part of a cantankerous old woman called Helen in one of Jean McConnell's series of playlets 'Deckchairs.' Though the only reason I can think of for wanting to play such a cruel and desiccated character is that she reminds me of one of Saki's aunts.

We have been treated, for some reason, to a minor rash of programmes about Saki recently. Some dramatisations of the stories were even playing on the television when I returned.
I adore Saki, he is one of my favourite authors. I love his surreal quirkiness, his juxtaposition of the banal with the improbable, his sense of humour, the verbal pyrotechnics. Some tales have a dark side, too, on which I am not so keen - tales of revenge, the macabre, death. He is also not very fond of aunts.

But he is not a misogynist. Indeed his stories are remarkable for the intelligent way in which he treats women, who are often the protagonists. If we exclude the aunts, it is the men, who on the whole, are caricatured and satirised.

Where else but in Saki would you find such a delicious opening as this (The story is 'Laura'):

"You are not really dying, are you?" asked Amanda.
"I have the doctor's permission to live till Tuesday," said Laura.
"But today is Saturday; this is serious!" gasped Amanda.
"I don't know about it being serious; it certainly is Saturday," said Laura.

When I am writing I sometimes like to picture him, sitting in an elegant silk dressing down, a fountain pen effortlessly flowing over the notepad on his knee; rarely pausing, rarely changing a word or crossing out. Sometimes I ask his advice.

"How should I end this piece?" I feel like asking him today.

"My dear Fenella, you could always try an invasion of the Visigoths and end it that way or perhaps you could seek out the gardener and borrow some arsenic. On the other hand, you could, you know, simply end it with a full stop!"

Precisely.














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WHEN YOU TALK TO ANIMALS YOU SHOULD BEAR IN MIND THE BOLTON DEFENCE

A beautiful morning, the light crisp and translucent; endless shades of new green growth against a blue and hazy sky. The cherry tree across the road is in full bloom, tumbling waterfalls of knicker pink blossom on the pavement beneath. You can understand why the Japanese, sensible and aesthetic people they so often are, set out tables and chairs so that passers-by may better admire the cherry blossoms silhouetted in the spring sunlight against the snow of Mount Fuji.

In the air above a swirl of Jackdaws clacked. One flew down and began to peck at something in the roadway. His left-wing drooped in an injured fashion that reminded me of Max, the Jackdaw I had saved from the cats last August and who had subsequently taken up residence in our garden shed for the next three weeks. He had departed one day, quite suddenly, without so much as a scribbled thank-you note; gone, vamoosed, vanished without a trace.

Yet a few days later, the shed door still left ajar against his improbable return and his favourite brand of digestive biscuit ready in his bowl, I thought I saw him. He had flown out of a high tree as I had been passing and had swooped down to look at me, checking on who I might be, as it were, before flying what I like to think of as a saluting circuit, or rather two circuits, for he circled around me twice, anticlockwise, before veering away.

That was all of nine months ago and I had quite forgotten the incident and so was unprepared when, a few days ago, I noticed the Jackdaw in the road desisting from his breakfast of flattened pizza remains to peer at me with a strange, short-sighted, don't-know-whether-I-should-drop-in-for-a-digestive-biscuit sort of look.

"Max," I whispered hesitantly, "Max, is that you?"

But Max merely looked quizzical and then with a let's-pretend-it-isn't-and-see-what-happens look, took off sharply. After all this was the both the middle of the road and the middle of the school run, and a Yummy Mummy in a not so yummy 4 x 4 was approaching apace.

His wing, so droopy and bedraggled on the ground, evidently offered minimal inconvenience in the air, for in a few hefty flaps, he had regained the elevated sanctuary of the chimney pots.
But he didn't alight there as he might have done. No, he carried on flying. The same anticlockwise circuit, the same port wing held low.

Could this be Max, I mused, as I followed his aerial path? Could it really be the same bird? "Max!" I called forlornly a last time, before he broke off and disappeared no doubt to continue breakfasting in more tranquil surroundings.

Oh dear, I have already got a reputation for talking to animals. What will the mummies, both yummy and slummy, think of someone passing the school talking to the birds?

Still, I thank my stars I live in Wales and not Newcastle where the improbably named Kyle Little was fined £50 the other day for growling at a pair of Labradors, something that the police deemed had distressed both the dogs and her owner, though how they managed to gather their evidence on this point is not stated. The owner did not lodge a complaint, after all and I'm told the Labradors refused to communicate in any language but their own. But perhaps the police these days are trained in the subtler aspects of canine interrogation.

However, all was not lost in Mr Little's world, for in a tale that could have come straight from the pen of A.P Herbert, a blow for freedom, and a defence of the good old British liberty to talk to animals in whatever language you want, was upheld. The case against Mr Little and the allegedly distressed Labradors was dismissed on appeal by Mrs Justice Cocklecarrot herself - here in the sensible and redoubtable shape of Her Honour Judge Beatrice Bolton.

"The law is not an ass," she is reported to have boomed.

Fennie is saved. In future, should a Yummy Mummy dare to tell me off I shall claim the Bolton defence. Hee-Haw, hee-haw.