Une petite pause sur la terrasse

Quel est ce monde, si plein de soins,

Nous n'avons pas le temps de se lever et regarder. 

William Henry Davies ~ Leisure

What is this world, if full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No apologies for using this quote once more, but it is just so apt and reminds me how lucky I am to have the time!  I’ve also translated it into French and it still scans quite well, now I just need to learn it sufficiently to retort to our neighbour the next time we are sitting outside having a very English Tea break and she passes with a somewhat surprised “Ah, une petite pause!” hence the title of this small piece.

At a recent petite pause, we were far from idle, as there was just so much birdlife to see, and at times to duck from; as the swallows, who in many ways stole the show, used the space between the buildings as a wall of death repeatedly flying round and round in close formation, as many as six at a time.  Then, one or more would peel off and either rollercoast down towards us and backwards and forwards between the house sometimes seeming to play chicken with us, who would duck or swerve first!, or they slalom in and out of any open door or window – barn, garage or indeed house – before a tighter wall of death sequence and back out into the general mêlée.  Who needs animals in a circus when you have nature’s own fantastic antics?  And, the swallows don’t stop there, as not only are they the aeronautical acrobats but they also do a mean high wire act (although when the young are just learning to fly it can be a little tentative, the less confident staying nearer the supports!), as well as clowning around just for the pure joy of chasing each other or laughing at the strange English couple sitting drinking their tea below.  They have also sent the odd “custard pie” our way, but it might be tempting fate to say they haven’t scored a direct hit – YET!!

But, it didn’t stop there, as in the time it took to drink the cuppa and force ourselves back to work we witnessed even more visually as well as audibly!  There was a blackbird and a little woodpecker who repeatedly flew, with a purpose, from the wooded bank behind the neighbour’s house to the garden of another neighbour and back.  They were obviously intent on something, which we later discovered was the rapidly ripening and equally rapidly disappearing cherries on the neighbour’s tree!

Distant mewings alerted us to a pair of huge buzzards soaring high above the hamlet on the warm currents rising from below, as mere specks high in the azure blue of the cloudless day, they were far too high to be hunting, even their keen eyesight wouldn’t have spotted a tasty field mouse from such a far-flung vantage point.  No, they were simply having fun and finding time to stop and stare, albeit aimlessly, well fed and happy on this warm sunny day.  With our own lunch looming fairly rapidly, we really ought to have dragged ourselves away from this remote display, but the languid mewings were cut into by the closed and louder sounds of the hoopoe – hoo poe, poe, poe, poeee .... and the nearly repetitious cuckooing of our neighbourhood thug, although our particular one has the tendency to add an occasional extra cuc – cuc koo, cuc koo, cuc koo, cuc cuc koo!!, in no obvious pattern, having the time not only to stand but also to listen, we spent some time trying to work out if the extra cuc was regular or erratic (OK, ‘er indoors is bound to pick up on that line and say that actually it was only me, not her!!)  Having just decided that the pattern was irregular, not to be outdone, and maybe trying to grab my attention, the hoopoe started to miss out the poe!!

Finally, there were the chickens noisily scatting around for any tasty morsel, behind the nearby barn, the cooing pigeons passing backwards and forwards further down the drive and the redstarts, who had successfully reared their brood in our open barn, bopping up and down with their squeaky warbling competing with the scolding chuckles and short twitters of the blue tits who had successfully nested in a small hole by our garage door. 

What with the pigeon piazza, the swallows multilayered spaghetti junction and the blackbird / woodpecker boulevard / motorway and all the various tweets and twitters, I’m tempted to say that thankfully there wasn’t a mobile phone in sight to shatter the peace, even though it wasn’t all that quiet.  And .... with so much going on there was a real danger that the petite pause would become somewhat grand!, and once we have our cour cache (hidden courtyard) très grand.  But, although this might stop our immediate neighbour from noticing us slacking, we will still, as during the recent weather, dine in the company of 1000’s of passersby, if the multitudes of vapour trails criss-crossing the sky are indicative of the evening rush hour.  Hopefully however, like the buzzards, they’ll be too high to really notice and certainly too far away for us to hear the unspoken tut-tuts or to see the nearly raised eyebrows as we have yet another petite pause.  But to that I’ll simply say -  Pas le temps de voir, en plein jour, Streams plein d'étoiles, comme un ciel de nuit. ~ No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night. A little more of that wonderful poem!