bank holiday weather

I should have known that, with the first test match of the season being played, a Bank Holiday looming and schools on half term, the glorious weather of a week ago would give place to cold, damp days. Perhaps appropriately, the week's signs of political and financial insecurity have added to the gloom. Autumn ranges of clothes are already appearing in the shops, although more than three weeks remain before the longest day, and what the television companies call 'a great summer of sport', accurately enough this time, is there to be enjoyed.

I am no ornithologist, but it has been a pleasure this year to hear the cuckoo again, after a cuckooless 2009 and a late appearance this spring. Since the death of Solomon, our much-loved ginger tom, several years ago, we have seen increasing numbers of birds in our small back garden, and have welcomed them with a bird bath and various types of food container. Our fiercely territorial but friendly robin (RVP, obviously) is there all the year round, but woodpeckers, pigeons, tits and many other birds, some of which I can't identify, especially as my cataract ripens, fill the garden with sound. The neighbours' cats regard our garden as an extension of their own, and are made welcome despite what they often leave behind, but they are only a minor threat to the birds, who thumb their noses from their high vantage-points.

The grass will never be better than average (slightly above Wembley's pitch, in other words, which has been laid, I think, eleven times, 'more often than Lady Chatterley', as a Grauniad journo put it the other day), and I am not a keen gardener, but it is a brief annual delight to see the clematis (accent on the first syllable rather than the second, for preference) burst out in purple and mauve between the garage and the fence. There, the Japanese would be proud of me.