Tuesday, we’ve been back nearly a week and I’ve spent hours in the garden and at the allotment. The sun is shining but it is not nearly as hot as Simiane. I can hear the wings of the wood pigeon as he or she arrives at the bay tree and engages reverse to slow enough to plunge elegantly into the glossy green foliage of the tree. They have nest in there. A red kite moves silently overhead, alerting me to his presence with his shadow. My little terrace here, where I have sown thyme to grow between the paving bricks, is untidy.

Another pigeon brings a twig and lands on the greenhouse and considers her approach for a moment or two before she lurches forward and disappears into the green. As I stare at the sky considering my next words a cormorant flies past, high up, travelling east. Sparrows buzz about and swifts twist and turn. Someone is hammering in a nail and the jackdaws keep time.

The untidiness of the little terrace is happy. There is the tub that carried the garlic back from the allotment, with a few dried garlic leaves littered around it; there is a bunch of lemon balm on the table which I meant to hang up in the kitchen; there is the tub I use for weeding, half full, and the yellow handled hand fork; marjoram has joined the thyme to grow between the bricks and is a little too boisterous; there are a few wrinkled dead weeds here and there, and plenty of living ones that compete with the thyme.. and it could do with sweeping.. there is a tiny spider crawling across the white page of my book.. I’m not sure what he’s looking for, but I don’t think he’ll find it here. The terrace will wait for attention; there are so many more things that need doing.

It was a wonderful holiday; I’m writing about it elsewhere, but here is home, where the sun shapes the squash leaves, where the hypericum clambers through the woodpile to shine its yellow flower, where the wind moves the leaves of the cherry tree and sets the spears of the flag iris aquivering; where the mulleins reach for the sky..