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A golden swarm of mayflies dances along the rays of the setting sun between the river and the sky. There was a time when the sky looked blue and stiff with its corners swept and its harsh, bright spaces vacant. There were dusty mutterings about withered crops, hungry stock and empty allotments; when a cloud came by I crossed my fingers hoping for rain. Life sought shadow and moved less until birdsong, hidden, sounded like whistling trees. On May Day around a scrubby patch in Lea quarry, a sudden ignition of cowslips, more than I'd seen in one place anywhere, revealed this space as it was, a relic of the ancient Westwood common, the only bit of original limestone grassland common not to be quarried, dumped on with spoil or farmed. As if to confirm this, a green hairstreak butterfly appeared and its green-gold brilliance together with the cowslips seemed to fill the column of air above that place with a burst of light.
A few days later, we went to see the river Severn at an all-time low in Ironbridge. As tyres screeched along the Wharfage, we dropped down behind the car park into a silent cloud of mayflies, glimmering with golden light above the water. By the time the sun set behind the cooling towers, the swarm had vanished, washed down-river.
The next morning felt like change, and by afternoon a gang of 20 swifts were screaming around Wenlock's church tower – they had come back from their travels. The swifts brought new weather and a soft, scent-releasing rain. The suddenness in the sky was charged with swashbuckling clouds and a rain of mad birds, gold swarms and iridescent wings. These things were not just loose ephemera but essential elements of a seasonal shift which opened the sky to May.
