On the 5th of May, the swifts come.

I know that at this very moment black swifts are racing across the sky.
About a dozen are heading for our street.
I listen to the silence high above my head,
I hear a tension, an incomplete picture waiting for its final touch.
I feel the anticipation as at the start of a symphony,
Expectation of the arrival of a familiar refrain.

And yet I know what is missing is actually a raucous screeching,
Like children coming out at break, absorbed in their own world.
With amazing aerobatics, and dog fights they will come,
Abandoned, and at easy, having crossed no-mans-land.

I know they will come, and I will be able to breath easily.

(Swifts arrived on the 9th May in Leicester.)

John Clare's Cottage

We went to visit the 'Peasant Poet' John Clare's Cottage in Helpston, near Peterborough.

I Am - John Clare

I am - yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:-
I am the self-consumer of my woes;-
They rise and vanish in oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes;-
And yet I am, and live - like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, -
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept,
There to abide with my creator, God;
And sleep as I in childhood, sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky. 

Joanna and Elizabeth with their 5ft2in friend

If only John could see what has happened to his cottage!

Apparently five families lived in this building

5'2" John was rejected by the Northamptonshire militia at a time when Britain was nervous about invasion, and the militia had money.  Clare walked 80 miles home from Epping Forest Asylum, surviving on grass to fill his stomach.  

Dad's facebook

A proud Dad posts videos of his daughter's Jazz Club performing.

Elizabeth's in the back row

Lubcloud- 3Bs

The girls and I explored the Lubcloud Loop, an addition to the 3B's which takes the walk away from main roads.  

My girls on the move

How We Feel

Here is a book written by a Neuroscientist, written in an entertaining and illuminating style.  

What I liked.  

A resilience factor proposed as a resilience factor against depression is noticing whether as a child you were inclined to smile.

You can detect a real smile because it also involved the Duchennes Muscles around the eyes. 

See www.deliveringhappiness.com/take-the-smile-test

You can detect which side of your brain has been activated by thoughts by looking at which directing you eye move whilst in thought.  Eyes to the right indicate Left hemisphere activity, eyes to the left, right brain. www.nlpu.com/Articles/artic14.htm

Also Frazzetto recounts the famous story of when Mr and Mrs DeGaulle visited Harold MacMillan in London shortly before Charles DeGaulle's retired.  MacMillan asked Mrs DeGaulle what she was hoping for in her retirement.  She replied with a smile 'A Penis'.  MacMillan gulped and made some retort that life was very busy at the present.  Later he realised that it was her Gallic pronunciation that had caused the confusion.  She had actually said 'Happiness'.