FROM THE BOOK

Here, in an extract from The Eternal Season, Stephen Rutt enjoys a welcome visitor

I am sitting in the sun, thinking, and through a deep blue, cloudless sky, the first swallow of the year comes sailing. It is singing as if to itself, of all the land covered since last September, all the sky flitted through since it was last here. Its tail is a long extension of its elegant, long thin body and the quick flickering of those wings. And it’s off, over the hedge, into the hamlet in an instant.

One swallow doesn’t make a summer. It’s one of those clichés that everyone knows: the origin of it, from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, is less widely known. The full context of the quote is: “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.”

That suggests to me that the swallow was well known already: familiar enough to be used in common example. I guess in Ancient Greece they still had freak spring storms, or the cold days when the flow of warm southern air ushering migrant birds up from Africa would swing to the north and the season – and its birds – would shudder to a halt.

I like this a lot: I have a tendency to go on about how birds (and our passions for them) can be used as ways of linking us to the world, its people and places, whether across the distance of space or time.

This swallow – this common phrase on this fine early April day – links me to the Cape of South Africa. It links me to the inventors of Western civilisation, those first Europeans who just sat (doubtless outside on a spring day, as sunny as this one) and thought and saw swallows and knew what they were and enjoyed them.