Small things

Once again, I wanted to blog about the books I had prepared last week and once again I have switched (slightly) my purpose because of small things.

One member of The Little Family has her birthday on 21 July. And for as long as she has been born, the wheat has been reaped on this very day. The noise, the dust, the scent of the cut straw has always been linked with her birthday cake, the scent of the wax and smoke of the candles, the rustle of the paper covering her presents being torn apart and crumpled, the little cries of delight, and the rush to hug and embrace as she is happy before her discoveries. There is a kind of harmony between these so-different noises, scents and movements Something that binds nature and humanity.

Therefore, I was surprised to hear the noise of the combine yesterday evening, then the dust of the ears shorn and cast down, then the scent. And as it was evening, we were in the sitting room watching TV with our hands folded in our laps, not at all in a festive mood. The smell was the most disturbing element: it was gasoil.

Now, in the past years, the scent of the reaped wheat was of earth, of frost, of days of rain, of mornings of dew and mist, of noons of blaze and sun, of afternoons of doze, of evenings of warm straw long in the air after the first stars, melting with the tang of the river and the heady wine perfume of the roses.

Yesterday, the smell brought no history and no story with it as there was no story nor joy at home.

Small things.

Small things like the sequel of the book about which I had decided to talk. So it will be odd to talk of this follow-up and of the first book afterwards but let's make the unusual step. 

I have read 'The Proper Place" in the re-edition by Greyladies when it came hot from the press and, as the few books by Olivia Douglas, I have enjoyed it straight away. When the sequel was published I bought it almost immediately and became the happy owner of "The Day of Small Things".

The title is a quote from Zechariah - 4:10 and runs thus ( in the King James Authorised Version):  

"For who hath despised the day of small things? For they shall rejoice and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the Lord which run to and fro through the whole earth."

I grant you that out of its context, this is rather enigmatic (and even more for a French Provincial Lady who turned to her own Bible in French and found it as enigmatic but for the copious notes that were added for undersanding and clarification).

Fortunately, after having read the book, I decided that the first sentence only was relevant and it is clear enough:

"For who has despised the day of small things?"

For those of you who would happen not to know Olivia Douglas, here is a link to a very short (too short) biography:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Douglas

Scottish, like D.E. Stevenson who wrote Miss Buncle's Book about which I talked some weeks ago here:

http://camilledefleurville.blogspot.fr/2015/05/miss-buncle-goes-to-la-dordogne.html

As well acquainted than D.E. Stevenson, with literary connections most prominent and still well-known today thanks to Alfred Hitchcock's' movie even if purists do not agree ... And John Buchan was one of these rare writers for middle-class gentlemen about which Kate Mac Donald, one of my favourite academics in this particular field, has written.

When I re-read both books, "The Proper Place"and "The Day of Small Things", I had more mixed feelings. Perhaps I have read too many middle-brow novels for middle-classes of the inter-war. I am less immediately enthusiastic and more moderate in my praise. But this fiction is worth reading, thanks to Greyladies printing and publishing house, today.

A sequel is always something difficult to write and to read. We know the characters - or most of them - and we know the pattern of the first book that we have loved.  How to keep readers interested while renewing oneself? Are the characters thick and full enough to resist to a protracted life? Can the pattern be renewed and yet sustaining the attractive traits that were cherished by the readers?

Whatever was in "The Proper Place", the theme and topic of "The Day of Smal Things" is clearly stated in the second chapter - right at the opening of the nove by Nicole, one of the main charactersl:

"I am absurdly pleased with life. Of course things are different now, but once you accept the fact, it's all right. To you and to me is the day of small things - Who said that? Someone in the  Bible, wasn't it? And the small things keep you going wonderfully: the kindness of friends; the fact of being needed; nice meals; books; interesting plays; the funny people in the world; the sea and the space and the wind - not very small, are they, after all?"

Lady Jane Rutherfurd and her daughter Nicole have lost almost everything during and after the Great War of 1914-1918: husband and sons, father and brothers and, for lack of money, the ancestral seat of Rutherfurd in the Borders.

Not wanting to stay close from their former home, former friends, former landscapes, and former station in life, they have decided to leave the Borders to another area of Scotland, the Fife land.

There, there have elected to live in "small" house in the harbour of Kirkmeikle, on the sea front, far from the genteel villas built recently on the hill up the fishing town and they have mingled (they say "made friends") with fishermen and fisher wives, their children and the elders. They have also made friends with the inhabitants of the genteel villas and with the more permanent and older residents of the town: the reverend and his family, the doctor and his sister. 

In The Small Things, we find them again in the same environment endowed with the same characteristics as before. For Angela Thirkell readers, lady Jane will be some sort of Lady Emily Leslie and Mrs Brandon in even less energetic frame of mind and absolutely no flirtatious manners (some sort of Agnes Graham and Mrs Dean, perhaps). She is tired, melancholic, resigned, lamblike, always on the brink of tears but never shedding them, delicate, and full of compassion. Her daughter who has been badly treated by life has the energy her mother has not, tries very hard to be happy and to make others happy according to her views, walks, admires landscapes, reads, talks, arranges little tea parties and luncheons or dinners and allows herself brief moments of dream and melancholy as well.

She describes their lives in the quote made higher: "I am absurdly pleased with life. Of course things are different now, but once you accept the fact it's all right. To you and to me is the day of small things."

However that would make no novel. Therefore, they are soon saddled with a "young bright thing", fresh from London, a bad set and a jilt, by a cousin of theirs who is the aunt of said "bright young thing". The connection, if there is a connection, is extremely tenuous. The whole topic will be to tame the "bright young thing" named Althea and demonstrate the small things are the best. 

Add little boys, permanent and less permanent (Olivia Douglas is very fond of little boys and of children in general: her books are teeming with them) going to school, asking for treats when back home, delighted by "small things", decent suitors, meals with new and old friends, holidays in the isle of Mull:

a return to the Borders:

and a happy ending mixed with some sadness or resolution à la Lily Dale taken from the Chronicles of Barset by Trollope.

To say more more would be to take away the bittersweet taste of the novel and of the tenor of life. There could many ways to analyse this book: I shall try my hand at it when reviewing the first volume "The Proper Place" but this one is too fragile to sustain critics be there positive or negative. Here is the stuff with which our lives are made: births, deaths, friendship, love, dreams... Small things that make our days.

Should one of them come to miss and we are confused, lost. I felt very strongly for Lady Jane and Nicole and all the other protagonists of this novel when the combine came yesterday evening to reap the wheat not at the proper time at all and there was but the smell of gasoil and noise of the machine without the story of the ears and of the straw and of the whole countryside mingled with the family joy of a birthday.

Yes, I am silly as all this will come to pass and life will go on. However, I, for one,  need to remember that " the small things keep you going wonderfully: the kindness of friends; the fact of being needed; nice meals; books; interesting plays; the funny people in the world; the sea and the space and the wind - not very small, are they, after all?"

The first holiday-makers are here!

I cannot say whether it is a blessing that The Village is not in the touristy areas of the Dordogne - and is not very touristy in itself. But, hush, I should not say this!

If you remember from a previous entry, the main monument is The Castle (second after Caesar's and other Emperors' castra). The building was begun in the middle of the 15th century and ended at the beginning of the 16th century. Therefore it still has defensive and architectural characteristics of the Middle-Ages as well as the new fashions of the Renaissance. That makes it a hybrid and a rather interesting example of transitions of society and role of castles and the aristocracy, written in stone.

However, as it is a private school and propriety, it is not open for visits but on appointments and on special days. Touristy in a very sparse way...

Economically speaking, not having anything really attractive for tourists is a loss for the shops, the local producers, the mairie. Or is it? 

The Offices de tourisme of the whole area from Périgueux to Montpon have worked jointly and made great efforts to promote the Vallée de l'Isle (the Isle River Valley) and, daring the pun, have called it L'Isle aux Trésors ("Isle" being pronounced like île - island - this gives "Treasures Isle/Island").

The Isle Valley: from Périgueux to Montpon
via
Saint-Astier, Neuvic and Mussidan
(Guess which one is The Village)

The book wriiten to promote the Valley

Then prices for hotels, guest houses, seasonal rentals, and campsites or campgrounds are far more reasonable than in most fashionable areas of the Périgord noir, Périgord Pourpre and even Périgord vert (for these see http://camilledefleurville.blogspot.fr/2015/05/proust-again.html). And their amenities are increased for fear of competition. Prices in shops, supermarkets, at local producers, etc., are also significantly lower. 

True, there are longer trips to see the more beautiful sites of Lascaux, Les Eyzies, Bergerac, Domme, Beynac, La Roque-Gageac, Montbazillac, Brantôme, which we shall visit in other later this summer. But all in all, in this era of financial crisis, it is not a drawback to stay a little further and plan little trips interspersed by rest days in The Village.

And there comes the uneasy encounter of the holiday makers and the natives.

The natives are fully clothed and make an effort to dress casually but properly (and sometimes rather primly) to go shopping in le bourg or at the supermarket. The holiday makers are scantily dressed because it is very warm, even hot, and they are on holidays: they make a point of it. So shorts, very low-necked blouses,and flip flop shoes confront summer frocks, light trousers with polo neck shirts, and flat shoes or sandals. With long reproachful or defying glances.

The holiday makers laugh and speak loudly, never hurry and push to be in front or loll in the middle of streets and shop aisles. They make big knots of families with hollering, bawling children and roaring adults. The natives walk purposefully, gather only to meet neighbours and friends and say a short word of greeting, push their trolleys with a shopping list in hand, wait their turn at the cash desk, and mark their disapprobation to every noise while they encounter defying winces.

And even if the natives are used to English speaking people as The Village has a long standing twinning with a small town of Southern England and counts a number of more or less permanent British residents quite efficient and sometimes leading in our municipal activities, a bland, nay sometimes hostile glowering may meet too obvious English or other language speaking foreigner. They are not "nos Anglais"!

One does not see any real aggressivity in all these manifestations: this is not a feud but a ritual game that would be missed were it not enacted year after year. It is part of the seasonal traditions and attractions. Part of the holiday makers have been coming for years and have played the game even if they have made friends with some of the natives and know the shop keepers as well as anybody else in The Village. Their children have grown up and are now youngsters or married and are coming with their own children. But still, the game goes on. For the fun of it.

We are very simple people, satisfied with simple things. And, after all, don't we play at holiday makers when we go away from our precincts?

The New Provincial Lady has not blogged

I usually blog on Sundays. You may have seen that I do not truly plan my readings and entries may vary a lot from one week to another, moreover if something gossipy and interesting happens in the village.

Anyway this week I was ready. I had read two books about which I really wanted to talk. I had prepared my arguments and my layers of arguments. I had chosen the illustrations. I had thought about counter-arguments and the way to counter the counter-arguments and all in all I was quite happy with myself.

However when time came to type, I procrastinated. It was too hot and heat disagrees with me. I had other activities of the housekeeping type that were urgently requiring me. The little family had to he hugged and petted and talked with. I had a headache. In one sentence I was fully occupied.

When dinner time arrived, I was on my sister's bed trying to read "Palladian" by Elizabeth Taylor because I had read something about the book but I could not concentrate and I found that I was ready to cry. I wanted one thing: my bed. With closed shutters and a good wallowing in tears.

I must avow that although I try to smile through life and soldier on like a gallant infantry trooper, the morale was lacking today. Sometimes I realise that from now on life will be loneliness: if I except the little family with its mental disabilities and the village gossip, there is no one to talk to. Nobody with whom to share laughs, opinions, discussions, stupidities, books, ideas, tastes, music, painting, writing, life.

Therefore this week blogging has seemed a fancy, a superfluity that so few people will read that it was not useful to polish arguments and illustrations.

Now at last the hour of blessèd sleep has come and I wish it would last at least a hundred years! The New Provincial Lady has not blogged.

Texts belong as much to the reader as to the author

In a previous entry, "No challenge for the Provincial Lady" (http://camilledefleurville.blogspot.fr/2015/06/no-challenge-for-new-provincial-lady.html), I talked among other books about "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt, that I had read in French as "Le Chardonneret".

I am afraid my comment was not entirely positive. There it went: 

"So, I grabbed "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt because it was close and handy (paperback) while heavy and full of promises of a universe of its own between its front and back covers, being so big - a page turner? -, and because I dimly thought it spoke of Flemish painting, and nothing seemed better appropriate in this calm than the calm of Flemish masters. [...]
I have read a page turner, as a page turner it is, full of more or less veiled allusions to Pip and Estella, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, to memories of Henry James, to the glare and blare of the USA, to the deserts of Nevada, the wilderness and sophistication of different New-York Cities, to the Russian-Ukrainian mafia, to the traffic of "oeuvres d'art", to the American middle-class whose dreams seem broken, to the lower shallows where drugs and adulterated alcohol are more usual than sleep and food, to the heights to the upper class where money is far from being the only criterion to be a member of the "caste"... 

A dancing, stunning, rich, full and replete book where the loose threads of the beginning get woven together little by little to be rounded off at the end. A compelling book that went with me in the early morning, the lazy hours around tea in the afternoon, and at night when I could not sleep. But a book that left me with a hangover and a pasty taste in the mouth: why pseudo-philosophical comments as a final touch? The braid that had been woven seemed to be over-weighty and contrived by a useless load of "morale", as these fables that always carry a "preach" and lesson.

But a "tour de force"."

Since then, I have talked with friends and read the blog of some one I do respect as literary competence are involved.

The first friend with whom I talked is American. He told me that this book was among his five top ten readings of last years and he thought highly of it. As he is not very talkative about description of his feelings, I had to be let with this cryptic statement but I knew he meant it because my friend is eminently truthful. I know as well that he knows the desert of Nevada and the life in New-York City and has travelled to The Netherlands. He is a keen connoiseur of paintings and the arts. He is receptive to atmospheres. He knows about the problems of youngsters smoking, smoking drugs, and drinking. He knows the "Bohemian" side of the Village well and the upper-classes of NYC as well. He has read and reads a lot and was appreciative of Harry Potter. Lots of assets to make a clever reading of "The Goldfinch".

My second friend is Russian and deely in love with English literature. She underlined the relationship with Cherles Dickens, with the Bildungsroman and "David Copperfield" and mentioned Pip and Estella - the latter split between Kitsey and Pippa. But of course, she insisted upon the links with Dostoyevsky - "The Gambler" of course, "The Idiot", "The Brothers Karamazov" - and I saw the point as with philosophy and reflexion upon arts and the "oeuvre d'art" at the end of the novel, the last pages of Dona Tartt's novel. My Russian friend is a pianist and senses things I tend to let aside.

The third opinion came through an exchange with a university professor of literature specialised in Henry James. She was reading "The Goldfinch" as one drinks water in small sips when one is thirsty. She enjoyed her reading and used the techniques she knows about close reading, reading against the grain, making notes, comparing with other sources and critics - or so I imagine. And she gave us her comments in a blog entry this morning: https://pigeonfiles.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/donna-tartts-the-goldfinch-the-imagination-of-disaster/.

I am definitely defeated. What I thought and felt as heavy lesson in the last pages of the novel, my two friends and the lady blogger qualify as a gem.

What is wrong about me? I have re-read those few pages and still find them as heavy as a 17th century sermon and as demonstrative, without any of the lightness of touch and gauzy approach I prefer. I feel a lesson is given to me and I have no option but to learn it. As a fractious child, I tend to rebel and would have preferred to be incited to consider it and to make an opinion by myself. But the majority is against me. I must me wrong. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

What my American friend has told recently comforts me a little: a text belongs as much to the reader as to its author. I will add: and each reader is free to own the text his or her own way, if he/she does not misrepresent it!

Meanwhile has already such a wee slip of a bird had so much interest focused on him?

Nights of juin

After I had written about the fête de la musique, I was unhappy with the entry and said so rather vehementy to a friend who retorted that he, as a reader, thought it did not need anything else and found that it was perfectly complete as it was. He added that a text belongs as much to the reader as to the author. I was very angry and almost deleted the entry but in the end let it stand as it was. And it is still here.

Nevertheless, this was still nagging at the back of my mind and I knew I wanted to talk about the nights of June, those without the noises of the fête, these particular nights of the year.

These particular nights that come late and very slowly and leave us early for morning light. A few hours of respite and peace, of semi-silence. The night to which Mrs Dalloway escapes when the weight of her party becomes too much.

In French, I would say that these nights come à pas de velours, with velvet steps or on tiptoe. It is nine o'colck and the sun is still here, the light more golden than during the day. There is a mellowness that the birds recognise and although it is warm, they begin to sing their adieux. The notes are not the same as in the early morning, as if they were drowsy and calling their young ones or saying good bye to their friends. In the house, the dining room is almost deserted, the table cloth almost naked, the china, glasses and cuttlery in the kitchen. Only crumbs and decanters, the fruit in a basket - the first peaches and apricots and nectarines -, a water pitcher, napkins.

Voices outside. In the now fading light, we are watering the flowers and their scent rises more pungent with the odour of wet earth. 

Time to talk leisurely while cutting the wilted roses from the rose trees, gathering them in baskets. A walk perhaps after that along the path near the river. The sky is turning a deep deep blue and the birds are quiet. Frogs are croaking near the pond and little green frogs skip over the water from grasses to waterlilies. We talk quietly: all noise wants to be banished. From time to time, car headlights pass by on the road. We breathe at last. And we are cloaked by the perfume of cut hay and new straw. One of us look up at the sky. It is the dark velvet night of June.

Time to go back home where children are asleep. The house is waiting for us. Lights open to the outside blackness. A stop in the garden and the creaking rattan armchairs to taste the coolness that has come at last.

Our talk is but a whisper that ripples the silence as do the footsteps of our neighbours on the gravel and then the squeaking of the iron gate behind them. We exchange good byes.

It is a quarter to eleven. 

Night insects are singing and their chimes are shrill.

I think of Tosca and the last aria of the tenor remembering the nights when he was coming to Floria's garden and house. 

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C12k6CnXN6U)

It is time to go inside and close the shutters, leaving the windows open for the fresh night air to come in. Time to dive in white beds; which are like pools of slumber waiting for us.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, the morning light will be here soon with dew and blue tints, lighter blue than this evening, birds chirping and twittering. Tomorrow. Tomorrow...

La Saint-Jean Bonfires

Last Saturday, I was looking through my e-mail box when I found the parish news with a special annoucement. 

There is no Parish Magazine in the village. The village is not even a parish in itself anymore. Of course, being of Roman Catholic culture, each village in France, even the smallest one, has a RC church even when the Protestants have fought and won the majority of the population in centuries past. However, as everywhere in the Western world, less and less people go to church, less and less people consider themselves Roman Catholics, less and less people consider themselves Christians and one is considered either slightly backward or devout fanatic when one is neither atheist or agnostic. In fact, one has to be either a Jew or a Muslim to proclaim one's religion - at one's own risks...

No church-goers, no priests. No priests, no individual villages with individual parishes. These are gathered in large entities called "parishes" as well. Our village is part of one of these entities and the parish includes no less than around fifteen or twenty villages and churches, which cover a large area. As there are not enough priests, the diocese has concluded an agreement with an order of monks who form little congregations in former disused abbeys. And the monks serve the villages forming the large new parish.

This is an awkward understanding and disposition.

Of course, rectories or vicarages are empty, like ours.

And the rectories were almost at the heart of the villages, near the churches, like ours again.

Our former old vicar was a pittoresque to be seen opening the doors of the church every day, crossing la place, the main square, to go and buy his bread at the baker's, or shopping at the shops' and not at the supermarket, gardening his plot of land around le presbytère, the vicarage, or sat at his desk, the presbytère door wide open to all and sundry.

He was a character. Born of Italian parents in Northern Italy, in a village of the Dolomites, come to France at the age of ten months when his father migrated with the whole family to find work in the coal mines of Lorraine, in the East of France; treated as migrants; his father slowly falling ill to the breathing illness of miners; uprooted again to be farmers in the South of Dordogne where the mine's owner had farms; his father given another job both by "Christian charity" and voting purposes as the mine owners were from a political family searching people support to be elected; being selected by the priest of his parish as a clever boy and sent to study at the petit séminaire, the minor seminary in Bergerac; being ill himself and having to stay in bed for a year; going back to the seminary and deciding that he would be priest by intense faith and calling. He was gruff. He could be unpleasant. He could be as soft as the wing of a dove. He was loving and caring. He did not show his feelings. He hunted for the sake of walking at dawn and watching nature awaking. He frightened his parishioners and his non parishioners and all the children. He was loved by his parishioners and his non parishioners and all the children - and all were proud of his oddities. He would love philosophy and theology, his computer and internet, music, football, Italy, his family, his friends, painting, sculpting, his patch of potatoes and tomatoes, a plate of pasta bolognese, and quarelling with his best liked parishioners. He was sure and upstanding in his faith, meek, irritable, generous, straighforward, frank, an accumulation of contradictions. He was human. 

He died one morning at dawn, in his beloved Dolomites, while he was on holidays in Italy, visiting his cousins. He died on a mountain path, alone in the dew, on an August morning. He left no public image of himself.

Of course, the village was used to see him every day. Of course, bells were ringing. Of course, there were regular church activities. 

Nowadays, one monk comes each Sunday morning and each Tuesday morning for mass, and goes back to his abbey or the centre of activities of the parish, which is the next village ten kilometres away. This is not far away. But a seeping feeling is growing of secularity and death of Christian culture which are seen through little things like the continuing death of the heart of the village. The vicarage and the church are empty shells at the core of an emptying bigger shell. And new activities are being born around the supermarket.

Paradox. In all this secularisation, the monks have revived one thing: le feu de la Saint-Jean, the bonfire of the feast of Saint-John-the-Baptist! 

In their desire to create something that would take back young people and children with their parents to church, they have ironically revived the old Midsummer pagan festivities that had been progressively forgotten during the last cntury! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midsummer)

Therefore the announcement in the parish leaflet I found in my mail box, inviting all people to come and share a picnic, and then music, dance and leaping over the bonfire on the 24th June - not on the Saint-John's Eve... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John%27s_Eve)

Who says that religions are dangerous? They are, certainly they are. They are also on the long run but a veneer. Long live traditions!

https://youtu.be/Lqy36hliTnQ

Summer is ycumen in

The Cuckoo Song (Sumer is icumen / ycumen in)

Middle English:

Sumer is icumen in,

~Summer has come in,

Lhude sing cuccu!

~Loudly sing, Cuckoo!

Groweþ sed and bloweþ med

~The seed grows and the meadow blooms

And springþ þe wde nu,

~And the wood springs anew,

Sing cuccu!

~Sing, Cuckoo!

Awe bleteþ after lomb,

~The ewe bleats after the lamb

Lhouþ after calue cu.

~The cow lows after the calf.

Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,

~The bullock stirs, the stag farts,

Murie sing cuccu!

~Merrily sing, Cuckoo!

Cuccu, cuccu, wel þu singes cuccu;

~Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing, cuckoo;

Ne swik þu nauer nu.

~Don't you ever stop now,

Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.

~Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.

Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

~Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!

From *Sumer is icumen in: chants medivaeux anglais, performed by the Hilliard Ensemble, directed by Paul Hilliard. Used by arrangement with Harmonica Mundi USA.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature 

Composed probably in the twelfth century, this is one of the oldest surviving Middle English lyrics.

"Sumer Is Icumen In" is a traditional English round, and possibly the oldest such example of counterpoint in existence. The title might be translated as "Summer has come in" or "Summer has arrived".

The round is sometimes known as the Reading rota because the manuscript comes from Reading Abbey though it may not have been written there. It is the oldest piece of six-part polyphonic music (Albright, 1994). Its composer is anonymous, possibly W. de Wycombe, and it is estimated to date from around 1260. The manuscript is now at the British Library. The language is Middle English, more exactly Wessex dialect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer_Is...

*

Cuckoo - Cuculus canorus - Family: Cuculidae

The cuckoo is a medium sized bird about the size of a pigeon. A summer visitor to England, cuckoos arrive in April and the adults leave as early as the end of July. The young leave later, finding their way back to an Africa they have never seen before. This is, famously, a parasitic bird - the female lays a single egg in the nest of smaller birds such as reed warblers, dunnocks and meadow pipits. When the young cuckoo hatches, it forces the other eggs out of the nest, and is then reared by the hosts. It has declined in abundance since the 1980s, possibly because of similar decreases in the numbers of nest host species such as dunnock and meadow pipit.

Cuckoos are generally a grey colour with the females being slightly browner. The primary feathers on the wings are black as is the tail but with white markings along its length. When the bird is perching the wings are held in a downward position, looking as if they do not fold properly, and the tail is held up, making it look slightly awkward. In flight, their appearance is superficially similar to the kestrel, with sharp, backswept wings and a powerful wing beat. It is only the male who makes the familiar call at the beginning of the breeding season in spring. Occasionally, three notes are heard rather than two. Cuckoos are found in a range of habitats including woodland, marshland, heath and open moorland.

They can often be heard from gardens and occasionally seen passing overhead but you need to be a little fortunate actually to see one in your garden.

Food

Insects: this is one of the only species able to eat hairy caterpillars. On arrival in the spring they are often seen gorging themselves on newly emerged caterpillars of the drinker moth. Predator of butterflies, moths, spiders and worms.

Prey

Drinker moth, Dunnock, Meadow pipit, Moths, Spiders and harvestmen, Worms

~ http://www.plantpress.com/wildlife/o1...

*

You may shake your heads and mutter "almost an academic blog" today with all these references both musicological and ornithological! Very starched introduction to a very simple fact: summer is coming in today! Let us be happy and sing its arrival.

This arrival coincides in France with the Fête de la musique who was born in the years 1980s under the President Mitterrand and the ministre de la culture, Jack Lang. Every French person was invited to come down into the streets and play instriments or sing or give concert. It was to be a celebration of music as the cuckoo celebrates summer with its song.

Of course, all French persons did not go down in the streets or squares or roads, singong and playing. Of course, some did and were more wreckrages than success. Of course, time passing, the joyous and spontaneous celebration became institutionalised and nowadays there are more concerts than individual happy enterprise. Nevertheless, la fête de la musique marks the beginning of summer in all cities, towns and villages.

The house is about one kilometre from the village but I am sure that this evening we shall be able to hear the pounding and thumping sound of some music from groups invited by le Centre multiculturel and followed by some more loud pounding and thumping music from groups invited by the local café. 

At the same time, the French State TV channels will broadcast variety and/or classical music from somewhere in Paris and the host will be some well-known master of ceremony who will try to teach classical music to the spectators.

I long for something different that will happen tomorrow evening and every day that will follow during summertime.

I long for the noises of summer.