THE STARLINGS HAVE RETURNED

There's a comforting fragrance in the air these bright spring mornings: a crisp wafting of dampness and cherry blossom, of tangled buds bursting through their winter carapaces, the new horizon of infinite possibility that this time of year always seems to herald.

This morning two starlings sat optimistically on the telephone wire that enters the house above my bedroom window. For as long as we have lived here, a loose board has given access to the attic and the starlings (they can't always be the same pair surely?) take advantage. But who determines which pair gets this choice nesting site in the dry insulation of a centrally heated house? There never seems to be any competition.

I love the mimicry of starlings: the way they sit on the television aerial making mobile phone rings, though as our TNT driver has a phone programmed to mimic a cock crowing, one wonders who is imitating whom. But all birdsong is enriching even the harsh cries of jays and magpies.

The other day I heard one of these birds - or maybe several - in the hedge on the Roman road. I could not precisely identify the cry; but it was loud, near and insistent. Though I peered into the hedge, I saw no bird - surely it must be quite large, I thought - nor did anything take flight. As I walked on, whatever it was followed calling to me anew. Strange, eerie even.

"Whatever is that bird?" I asked someone passing, a dutiful black Labrador at heel. "It's the power cables," she replied, pointing upwards.

I looked and sure enough we were under the heavy power line that runs northwards from Aberthaw. The paired cables are being renewed at the moment and normally they are held by spacers some nine inches apart. Clearly this operation had not been completed for the light wind was causing the steel cables to oscillate, so that they swung together irregularly, clashing, whooping and clacking like an outraged crow.

So that was the answer. The cables came together and the 'bird' sang. The cables drifted apart and silence reigned. The 'bird' seemed to be always in the adjacent hedge because the 'bird' was overhead.

In the evening I went along to a dinner marking the 50th anniversary of the EU. A select gathering, held for some reason in a Chinese restaurant. The guests were two Parliamentarians. Both spoke positively and well.

Unexpectedly, I found myself called upon for the vote of thanks and as it had been an occasion to remember the events that led to the initial partnership of six countries, I touched upon the great famine in Continental Europe after the Second World War - an event that British histories tend to overlook - and also of the Berlin airlift - on which my own father served and from the rigours of which he escaped to the rather different rigour of pig farming.

In those days when pigs were fattened on swill on the 'waste not - want not' principle, I used to think we were farming starlings, for the swill attracted great flocks of them. So when a pair sit outside my window, preening their iridescent feathers and hygienically wiping their beaks as starlings are wont to do, I am instantly transported to those far off and unenlightened days half a century ago when even visitors from France were deemed aliens and required to register at the police station.

And not only that. Despite the pressures of the moment, I feel compelled to blog it, too.

Posted by Fennie Somerville