Bats and the Cycle.

The passage of the seasons is a seamless though often erratic affair, but we have several events in Britain which I regard as marking the end of the light time and the beginning of the dark.

There’s the final cricket test match at The Oval Cricket Ground, the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, the chatter and drone of the farmer’s machine as he trims the field boundary hedges, and the woolly whiteness of the willow herb seeds on the lane verges. And then there’s the last of them.

I haven’t seen any bats flitting acrobatically over the lane and garden for the past several evenings. Watching bats fly during the long summer twilights is one of life’s great pleasures for me, and now all I can do is wish them a safe sleep and successful return when the wheel comes round another half circle on our own fretful strutting to the final curtain.