Spring’s sights and sounds make it good to be alive

I HAVE heard the first curlew of spring. A pair, in fact, calling to each other across the sodden fields of Airedale.

This is the most heartening sound for many months. When these birds come back from their sojourn in the south, winter is as good as over.

There are other signs, too, on my walk to the allotment. Roadside daffodils are blooming, plus a few crocuses. Croci?

Who cares about the right word, frail, purple things they are. The white and purple heather in my back yard is in full flower and it won’t be long before the primroses put forth their pastel colours.

One way and another, this is a good time to be alive, savouring the freedoms of “endemic” Covid.

We must learn to live with it, say

Cabinet ministers who don’t have to, living in the Whitehall bubble.

Cases in the village declined, before rising again to 404 per 100,000 people, well above the national average. Few now wear masks in the Co-op.

I still take mine and avoid times when schoolkids skitter round the aisles.

I managed only one day’s walk in the sunshine, but I’m getting on with the gardening jobs.

Two bags of seed potatoes from

Wilkinson’s, £2.50 each – which strikes me as a bargain, although what would I know about the price of seed spuds – are chitting in the shed.

Glad I got that spelling right.

I have a bag of onion sets, but the experts say don’t plant yet, and snip off the top so that the birds can’t steal them. Never thought of that.

We are not out of the woods yet, but it’s light earlier, so it feels more like the spring the meteorologists say has now begun.