It’s a colourless February day - a milky sky and everything is just stone and silt, bare branches, low cloud.

But the birds are singing. Maybe I’m imagining it but it doesn’t feel as though the birds have been this vocal in a while. A few days lately it has been sunny, light, a glimmer to the air - you could have been lured into thinking it was spring. Not yet - we learned that lesson last year when all emerging shoots disappeared under a blanket of snow mid-March.

In the garden so much is happening now, even if it is just out of view, just beneath the surface. It makes me think of the metaphor of the swan gliding over a flat pond. All seems calm and serene, though below the water-line there is a wild mayhem of peddling and effort and churned bubbles.