Peacocks emerge from winter sleep in combative mood

Claxton, Norfolk To be touched by those fluttering wings is to be brushed by velvet. Yet in this way they contest anything that transgresses their boundary

Normally all the softness of the English summer is in a blackbird's syrinx. Today, however, as the sound of the song wafts towards me across the garden, it somehow seems to congeal in these north-easterlies. It is like a dark warm spawn-filled pond of music but with ice edges. I go out and the air is cold. The new greens in the hawthorns and the oaks are cold in tone. Even the sunlight feels cold, and the blue above has clouds with an unmistakable hint of ice.

Sure enough, when it rains for about 60 seconds as I reach the marsh, it falls as hail. Then it stops again. The sun beats down and it feels like the weirdest spring I can recall.