A slight surprise

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Sometimes, I step outside my front door and get a nice surprise, like a fleeting glimpse of a roe deer or the arrival of the swifts for the summer or any kind of parcel. Today, I really was not expecting this:

Or, in fact, this:

Or this:

There was a little bank holiday fete going on across the way, and a gentleman had pitched up with a sea eagle, two owls, a peregrine falcon and a harrier hawk. It really was rather thrilling.

Then my gorgeous niece turned up and my day was made.

I don't want to go too bucolic on your ass, but I would also like to state for the record that I actually observed some lambs gambolling in the south meadow this morning. I'm afraid there was no other word for it. It's not so very long ago that I spent my time running between the All Saint's Road and Dean Street pretending to be something out of a novel by Colin MacInnes, and now I get my kicks watching small sheep jump about in a green field. My friend Sophie was the one who watched the nature programmes; I was much too busy reading sordid biographies of Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker. Now, all I can think about is when my swallows are going to come back from their African wintering grounds to build their traditional nest in the shed. (Each year, I am terrified something will happen to them on the long journey home, and the perfect little wattle nests will remain forlorn and empty.) It wasn't how I thought my life would turn out.  It got this way through a tangle of serendipity and circumstance, and I would not change it for gold or rubies.

Have a lovely weekend.