Let’s get the melancholy bit out of the way.

I finally heard ten days ago, that we have a potentially wrecked engine (blown turbo on the way back from a lovely day trip to Highgrove to see the gardens. After a further 3 days, and a considerable sum of money spent with the garage following this initial news, we DID have a wrecked engine), so we’ve been trying to source a replacement vehicle. Now found.

But that Monday was a day to match the mood – grey, wet and gloomy. The third dead barely hatched, turkey poult was found on Sunday evening just a foot from the by now unkempt mums, with 2 neat tiny puncture wounds either side of the neck. And a decidedly un Nutkin-like grey squirrel exited the crime scene on Monday morning, in spite of what we thought was a squirrel proof run, with a smirk on his (or her) face. Was it even the culprit?
Farmer Bunce had nothing on my zero tolerance state of mind just then.

So to switch to another Roald Dahl inspired plot (The Twits), sticky boards were tried overnight after my inability to wing it, or possibly them (since they seemed to daily change in size), with an air rifle. Nowt but a closed board, and a few tufts of squirrel fur.

Obviously they weren’t sticky enough.

And spring was meant to be a time of life bursting forth.

And then:

A day later the sun was out, the temperatures rose, and I spent all morning hand weeding, as is our self inflicted preferred way, bent double in the larch copse. But what was the bird singing short melancholic bursts of song throughout the day? The number of times I paused and craned upwards against the sky, before I actually managed to spot it, high up in the tree second from the left, below.

We’d previously found clusters of smashed banded snails beside anvil stones – a sure sign of song thrushes around.

Indeed, I’d seen these birds regularly on the ground, through all the cold weather. But not at all for the last 10 days. Perhaps the song thrushes were migrants which had now flown back to the continent?
If I recognised pitch, I could have identified it from this song as a mistle thrush, since they apparently sing in a minor key. Click here for a really useful guide to differences, including song, from the RSPB. But mistle thrushes are also less confident songsters, rarely repeating a phrase. And they do typically sing from high up in tall trees. But all day? Just to attract a mate, or establish territory?

I reckon that there might be some deeper purpose, or enjoyment. Perhaps like the musician in a sweet spot performance, they really do experience some joy, or physiological brain induced high? If this sounds a bit wacky, follow this link to the concepts of a resonating 11 dimensional universe by a world expert on string theory (Michio Kaku and click here for link to a video and transcript). I think that this subject definitely deserves revisiting later since I can barely grasp the concept, but for now I’ll just add that we’re at a brief point in the year, when the sun streams in through our tiny, East facing cowshed window, and fleetingly casts an arc of bright light over the piano keyboard, around 6.50 am.

As if inspired by this significant event, the other morning a new tune came to me. And with an ascending phrase, was altogether brighter and less melancholic than most of the ideas that randomly pop into my head. The idea that like the mistle thrush, I’m simply tuning in to the vibrations of the molecular beat of the universe, and simply resonating them through my brain patterns and finger movements, is a strangely appealing concept.
Occasionally with eyes closed, and playing a tune which by repetition becomes embedded into the neural pathways, one does indeed momentarily leave behind the here and now. Come to think of it, I read recently that the physiological brain changes associated with a pleasant musical experience are very similar to those enjoyed during sex. The same bits of the brain light up on a scan.
And this is a topic mentioned by many professional musicians. A recent radio interview between John Wilson and classically trained violin virtuoso Nigel Kennedy recalled a particular concert when Kennedy felt so at ease with his musical performance, that he ‘left the stage and then the concert hall’, mentally or spiritually, floating above the orchestra and audience, before finally thinking that perhaps his mind should rejoin his body once more to finish the piece! I should add that the punchline to this story was that he was, at the time, wearing a headband that he’d bought at auction. It had previously been owned by guitar legend Jimmy Hendrix.
Might some residual mood enhancing substance which he’d absorbed from the headband’s fabric, have induced this out of body experience, he speculated?

Tuesday’s evening clouds were so divine, with the fading chorus of birdsong on a still, nearly full moon evening, that I nipped inside for the camcorder. As I exited the back door, a red kite drifted effortlessly, with beat-less wings, uphill to a roost or possibly nest tree, in our neighbour’s field, joining and buzzing its mate already there.

And then as light left the scene and the moon curved higher and westwards behind our big oak, a robin took up station. Sadly, I can’t play the recorded song here, but it ranks as one of my very special moments in all the years at Gelli Uchaf.

And the garden and landscape had atoned for melancholic Monday.
Dewi, our itinerant cuckoo, returned last week to our great delight, joining the swallows and the reedy grasshopper warblers, as the trio of spring arrivals that should herald warmer times.

We live in such hope after another heavy frost last night. I read a brief piece at the weekend that reveals that their homing skills may be down to their (iron) balls. Or more accurately, the microscopic spherical iron particles in the hairs of their inner ears, which perhaps function as magnetoreceptors and give them their very own, on board compass, to help them navigate their way round the globe, along with the position of the sun. Click here for more, and an image of the tiny balls. Apparently, mammals don’t possess these tiny iron particles in their equivalent inner ears.
Which is, I guess, why we rely on sat navs or maps.

Here our most common enemies are hairy bittercress and creeping buttercup, along with woundwort. We’re spared ground elder and bindweed, at least for now. But one of the exciting aspects of this frankly mundane, tedious and repetitive garden task, is finding something new and unfamiliar, amongst the thousands of ordinary seedlings.