Resurrection Day

Outside, a blaze of colour. Hard to write this as I'm being intermittently savaged by Rupert our new kitten, driven to fury by the movement of my hands over the keyboard. As I stood on the step this morning with my two cats breathing in the novelty of a silent street - normally a constant ebb and flow roar of traffic and discordant voices and drillings and hammerings, anger and strife - a new world appeared.

First, the resident grey squirrel fossicking about under my car, then the pair of jays on the opposite roof rooting through the guy's flowerpots punctuating their cheerful vandalism with raucous barks and sawings and a disturbingly human heightened sigh. Suddenly, the instantly recognisable creaking of big birds in flight. I looked up expecting to see canada geese and was rewarded with a line of four mute swans, necks stretched, diagonalling over the street towards the Stoke Newington reservoirs.

Meanwhile a dunnock flits out of the yellow blaze of forsythia in the front garden and a flock of blue tits and great tits (sometimes in an extended alliance with long-tailed tits and goldcrests - depending on the political clime, i guess; but not today) swarm cheeping noisily round the offerings of seeds and nuts hanging from the windowbox (courtesy of the pound shop). They disappear as mysteriously as they appear and the street becomes authentically empty once more - except for the light. Nature abhors a vacuum.