May 1st

The First of May! Evocative words! The air is full of promise, a promise made in early March with the daffodils and now being magnificently fulfilled. Spring rode in, "crowned like a carefree king", and now the grass has taken on that vivid, late-spring green, the woods are full of the intense, almost unearthly blue glow of the bluebells, and the lanes are filling with cow parsley and hawthorn. The chestnuts are in bloom, the wisteria is in its full glory, the lilacs are bursting - is there another moment of the year more beautiful? Is it possible that every year the blossom is more abundant and mesmerising than the year before? It certainly seems like it - every year we are taken by surprise all over again. What luck to live in such a country!