One swallow

Well the may is out, but I am not ready to cast a clout.  Old country sayings are often misunderstood, and Ne'er cast a clout 'til May is out,  probably the most misinterpreted. May refers not to the month but to the blossom of the hawthorn tree which usually emerges in that month. May blossom is one of the most beautiful and though relatively short lived, it brightens the hedgerows and gives a promise of summer to come. The smell is sweet and pungent and perhaps not to everyone's taste  but I love it when the sun shines and that smell oozes through the country lanes.
I saw the first swallow this morning;  Just the one; it was swooping around the old pub that is being demolished just over the road. It was probably looking for last year's nesting site and saw no point in hanging around. Maybe it is coincidental that at last the sun has emerged momentarily, that signs of summer are beginning to appear.
As a boy I loved the spring, and still do. I remember woods carpeted with bluebells, or primroses, madly reproducing and growing before the canopies of the trees shaded them out. Meadows full of cowslips and buttercups and of course the migratory birds including the cuckoo. Nowadays it is rare to hear the cuckoo and it's numbers are depleted probably due to lack of suitable habitats for it's hosts to nest in, or maybe the host birds are getting better at hiding. Either way the cuckoo may be on its way to extinction.  Those familiar with its song will probably miss it but for many, it will pass like so many species have before, unnoticed.  Extinction is a fact of life, and any species that fails to adapt to change is doomed.
I am enjoying  this spring in a new habitat. I have left the coast and am revelling in a fertile and species rich location. I grew up by a river and there is a smaller but similar stream just along the road and my walks take me back, re-introducing wildlife that I had almost forgotten. I am told that there are kingfishers there and maybe one day I will get up early enough to see one.  Before that though I will wait until it is warm enough to cast that clout.

Sport

There is a very lovely woodland walk close to here. It meanders along the banks of a small river, through a mix of mature oaks and coppiced hazels. I have become fond of daily strolls along there, often with a sleeping Oscar in his push chair. The other day I stopped a while to watch a game of football between tow teams of thirty or forty somethings and was pleasantly surprised at the entertainment value of the game being played between two teams both eager to win despite the lack of financial incentives. There was a small cluster of spectators, enjoying themselves despite the inclemency of the weather, and I was reminded of the true nature of sport. There were no dives, no arguments with the referee, and no aggressiveness on the pitch.

We are unfortunately hosting the Olympic games this year. It is not just premiership football that has lost direction it seems. Sport at it's highest level has moved so far away from what most of us were brought up with, and the Olympics are nothing more than a vast money machine in which highly paid athletes meet on an international stage attempting to generate national pride for their homelands.

This year's olympics are beginning to look like a military operation, with ground to air rockets, defensive radar installations, armed police, troops on high alert and goodness knows what else being installed at great expense. I am sure that huge sums of cash will be spent on opening and closing ceremonies, in attempts to outshine previous nations attempts at impressing the watching world. Tickets for most events are already sold at very high prices and many, will almost certainly have been acquired  by various means by touts who will be selling them for even higher prices as the games get closer.  Our airports are already stretched to breaking point with huge queues at immigration, and this summer, things will get so much worse.

We are a country in dire financial straits and yet we are spending billions to provide a showcase for thousands of professional athletes to do what they are trained to do and have dedicated their lives to. There will be tens of thousands of drug tests, necessary because so many competitors have, in the past, cheated their way to success. Now the cheats are finding ways of avoiding detection in our win at any cost world.

I have no idea who won the game at the weekend. I have no idea who was playing whom, and frankly it didn't matter. I imagine that it mattered to those on the pitch, but I am sure that the manager of the losing team was not sacked nor hounded by the press because his team did not win. The only true sport takes place at an amateur level.