The swifts have gone and the swallows have almost gone. We have seen them on the telegraph wires in groups, and assumed they had then gone. Then a week ago we saw them in Lingen, and even tonight I saw one or two over the paddock. But tonight the sky over the valley was full of house martins, maybe 50 or 60 birds, great swooping clouds of them.
Schoolchildren outside Lucton School on a geography project, measuring something, taking notes, watching the traffic. The Teme swollen, wide, the colour of angry coffee.
And an end-of-holiday mood in town this morning, cool with the promise of holiday heat (that never came) and bakery smells from the supermarket and a faint nip in the air; the mood of holiday-otherness even as we walked into the shop, so that for a moment even the Tesco in Ludlow seemed to have that familiar exoticism - or exotic familiarity, more like - that food shops abroad have. Then it went.
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