What stories this little photo could tell.

In town the trickle of arriving students has turned into a steady flood. The fast trains from London arriving at the station full to bursting with fresh ( and nervous ) 18 year old faces. Last night we heard the sound of fireworks from across the water. The first of the freshers ceilidhs ?

The students may be arriving but out here on the coast the geese are leaving. Wave after wave after wave of them flying low along the coast.

 

The bronze age burial mound  seems to be some sort of honing point. Small flocks of six or twelve geese ( almost always six bit occasionally twelve, very rarely four ) come skimming over the wall where they circle, land and wait for other groups to join them.

This goes on all day. Even when the sea mist rolls in. When the time is right and they're rested and fed the geese head off in cohorts of forty or fifty.

Our first September here we'd just returned from France and didn't know whether we were coming or going. Last September the builders were hard at work and we'd moved into the house in town. This is the first year we've had a chance to really observe what's going on around us. There was a fear that life at the end of the farm track would be the height of boredom. Far from it. This morning the young lecturer (  recently returned from the house swap in Germany ) is out watching the geese and the Swifts with her toddlers. Her husband is inside having a long lie in and enjoying the weekend break from school run duty. She tells us the Swifts fly as high as 18,000 feet, pair for life and bathe by circling over and over thousands of feet up in the falling rain. On their long four week migration they fly when asleep.  There is something of the poet in her description. She tells me medieval Scots used to think Swifts were the departing souls of children - which is a very 'village' like Saturday morning conversation.

The wee house in town throws up some surprises. The plumbers have been in servicing the boiler. They find some old photos behind a partition wall. This one is of the towns second cinema ( now long demolished ) . I'm guessing ( the clues being two Home Guardsmen on the pavement by the cinema entrance and the RAF corporal in the middle of the group ) that this photograph was taken in the late summer of 1940. There's one student in his gown but I think that others must be bored Polish pilots from the Dunino airbase. They're barely out of their teens but between September 1939 and May 1940 their world had changed in ways they couldn't even have imagined. What stories this little picture could tell.