Wow, it’s blowing a gale here today. From time to time the roof of this old house creaks and invisible power lifts heavy slate and rafter as though the whole place were yawning and stretching – awakening perhaps, in imagination at least, to the brightness and promise of Spring. Birdsong rises above the sound of the wind – in fact everything, everywhere seems to be singing.

For actually the sky is bright and blue and clear – though “more grey”, says the Met Office, “for later”. Our first two brave daffodils are laughing in the current we can’t see – so imagination isn’t necessary, but flourishing anyway, so that one is almost certainly hearing these yellow harbingers calling out to the others, still furled and cautious, to hurry up and join the festival!

Walking out from the gym into morning sunlight earlier we noticed that grey had been swapped for blue and gold by an efficiently unseen mover and shaker. Yesterday the shoppers grumbled. Today they strode purposefully – with a gleam in the eye that suggested “blow the diet. Let’s have sticky toffee pudding” – throwing aforementioned caution, as they say, to the wind. Ha!

A flock of Canada Geese didn’t appear in the least-bit put out about being thrown off course. Collared doves and rooks are perhaps a little more anxious as they find it difficult enough already trying to get a grip on the sparrows’ suet feeder. My fastidiously brushed hair is roughly tousled by an out of sight tease. The affrontery of this gale! – but it absolutely makes me smile, despite myself.

Dank air around everything’s having been continuously flooded, soaked or frozen for weeks on end is blown elsewhere, somewhere, and the cosmic dryer disperses surface puddles and temporary field-lakeland. Forest deadwood falls to the floor, continuing its designed cycle of being and becoming, making way for new shoots, twigs, leaves and branches. Other-plane-power from beyond.

Resurrection. Warming. Wind-lift.