The bats and swallows are still with us in the Shire. I saw
a bat flying around the house this evening and the air was thick with swallows
at the top of my lane two days ago. So if the bats and swallows are still here,
does it mean that summer hasn’t ended yet?
Not according to my house it doesn’t. It’s been uncomfortably cold for two weeks now and it’s woken me up feeling chilled at night. If I weren’t such a miser (or a person of relatively meagre means) I would have switched my storage heaters on. But I am, so I haven’t. And it does give me a chance to coin a new adage.
We have one in Britain (and I expect others have
it too) which runs: One swallow does not
a summer make. Now I’m adding the corollary: A flock of swallows does not an autumn deny. You wouldn’t think I’d
still be undiscovered at my age, would you?
* * *
Today I did 2½ unbroken hours of strimming and hedge
trimming work in the garden. I think that’s the first time I’ve done 2½ hours
manual labour without a break since the kidney operation seven years ago. And
all I had to pay for it was two hours of backache.
(And did you notice that every word of the title begins with A, and so does 'alliteration'? How clever is that?)
No comments:
Post a Comment