How the sun makes everything better, so that you hardly notice the frost, even. There, last Sunday, not far out of the dual carriageway en route to Dunshaughlin, Meath, was an unseasonal sight. A big placard bearing the words "Strawberries For Sale". Surely left over from last summer. Not at all. There, the statutory distance beyond, were young people with their punnets. Never mind where the fruit came from. And, a bit beyond, the New Rooks (or New Crows, if you like), once again doing their building in those neat, low nests. You could almost reach up to them in their bare, adolescent ash trees. It is suggested that the birds there are rejects from a normal, lofty forest. Anyway the nests in their tidy crampedness remind you of those poky dwellings which builders sometimes hope to raise in social standing by calling "town houses". The rooks deserve notice for their nerve.
And a friend gave a good tip for frosty days. He always turns over a sold for the robin to get at worms and such things. And where he finds logs or timber in stacks of any kind, turns them too. The scuttling things underneath are appreciated by wrens and robins. A tip he says he got in one of the books of the late Olly McGilloway.
And talking of birds. Another year lost to do a good turn for that hero of the river, the dipper. A small wooden platform was to be set under the bridge. A platform for the nest. Earlier, the river was too high. Now it's said to be too late for this season anyway.
No trees moving just now, apart from those under glass. And a few shrubs. You forget that, under birch, lie snares: you can trip over as over your own lace: the fine, hardly seen, pliable black twigs which these trees shed almost unnoticed.
And that Judas tree. The wide awake John Kilbracken, as always on House of Lords writing paper, pulls us up on "more properly tree of Judah". Guilty my Lord. A mistranscription from Edlin's The Tree Key which reads: "introduced from Israel to southern France by Crusaders circa AD 1200 and called arbre de Judee, tree of Judea. This had become `Judas tree' by the time it reached England".
And the legend soon arose that Judas Iscariot hanged himself from its branches.