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A skittish breeze tweaks and teases at my notepad as I write. Tender baby leaves whisper all around, tickling the air with their freshness. 

The resident robin strikes a kitsch pose on the spade handle to scold and tease my now indifferent ageing cat.  A cock sparrow swaggers and choips on the wires, with an occasional softer aside to his clamorous brood in the eaves. His little spouse bustles back and forth, chittering and nattering to herself as busy womenfolk do. Further up, the jackdaws jabber and snicker as they jostle in and out of the last available chimney pot, the guttural squawks of their youngsters amplified from deep within.  Up on the hill, the rookery is in full hurly-burly. They cackle and caw-blimey like a Punch and Judy convention – a boisterous Welsh Valley choir. In the sky, a small outfit of soldier rooks raucously defend their twiggy apartment block from the constant thermalling predators overhead.

I peek down at the river below, and a feisty wren promptly nitters vehemently at me from the opposite bank. The dippers zip back and forth to their nest under the.bridge. Downstream, a muted quack betrays the first meeping wriggly pile of russet cottonwool ducklings. With the same coloration and clusteration as newly hatched garden spiders, they share the ability to rapidly disperse when disturbed, and reconvene as one when all is well. Representative of every mother’s nightmare, they bob blithely to the moods and perils of the waters. Deep in the shadows at the bend in the river, poised and patient, stands Frank the local heron, unmoving and unmoved by the cuteness of any passing morsel.

A couple of buzzards drift and mewl overhead. In the hedgerow, the blackbird chinks a strident siren alarm to all who would be wise to heed her sighting of the sparrow-hawk on his lightning inspection patrol. Because of him, the kingfishers have long since abandoned their den opposite mine.

So now you have been briefly introduced to the resident cast in the daily local operetta. 

When newly fledged, I was a noisy and demanding chick. My parents long despaired of my inconsolable colicky lamentations. But, little by little, they stumbled on the formula for peace: just pop me into the hooded depths of my super-sprung Silver Cross pram with lashings of gripe water and a thick satin-trimmed blanket; and whatever the weather, just park me at the bottom of the (very short) garden, under the silver birch tree. Within minutes, my wretched keening would subside and give way to intense and alert silence. My gaze would fix on the fine dancing branches of the tree, and I would begin to chirp along with the birds awhile, until peace prevailed. And so it was that I was early identified as the outdoor type – regardless, in fact inclusive, of weather. 

For me, real life was everything that happened outside, where my senses became superpowers, where I found every companion I could ever need. Everything I have ever truly understood has been gleaned from my surveillance of nature. When indoors, I was always close to the windows, curtains pulled back, afraid I might miss something: the blackbird nest in the rosebush inches from my glazed nose; the cacophony of sparrows in the eaves above my bedroom, from which so many featherless mini dinosaurs would fall every spring and be scooped up for my feeble and futile veterinary attentions.

I moved to Wales almost fifty years ago to occupy a long empty Victorian riverside villa. On the first night, with much to be done and scant possessions, I made a cosy nest downstairs, close to the window where I could be lulled by my new companion, the river, get accustomed to my new surroundings, and thrill to the owl who would hoot nightly down the chimney. A few nights later there was a terrible but exciting storm. Thunder and lightning, a south-westerly gale off the sea that shook all the windows, and to crown it all – a powercut.  I was in candlelit Hitchcock heaven. Then, in the wee small hours, there was an urgent tapping at the window.  I looked out to see nothing and nobody. It kept on, and I soon  began to feel disturbed. There was nothing for it but to go out and face what was either a twig or a psychopath. It was neither - just a very small and sodden robin, cowering in the corner of the window reveal. I scooped him up, brought him into the house, and plied him with cheese. He flew up to the mantelpiece, puffed up, sighed a robinny sigh, and fell asleep. In the morning, we shared a plate of bread and cheese, and then he clearly asked to be let out. I opened the window to a by now beautiful June day. He flew up and sat on the open frame, and proceeded to sing me the sweetest blessing before take-off.

Almost fifty years on, that tiny benediction serves me well.