Curlews are crying out for help

AFTER the constant blue skies and dry days of recent months, I had forgotten what the view looked like in rain.

Emerging from indoors one evening last week, I was staggered to see the world transformed, yet familiar, like a ghost come back.

I’d been in the pub for an hour — Friday evening’s ritual drink and catch-up with the news — but that wasn’t the cause of the staggering. It was that all had changed utterly, as the poet said, and another kind of beauty was born.