Jonathan Self has nailed it, just as his twins leave for university.
Decades ago, an adventurous pair of house martins moved from our stables, where there are a dozen nests, and set up home over a bedroom window on the seaward side of the house. Shakespeare’s ‘temple-haunting martlet’ is a notoriously noisy species, forever gossiping and squabbling, and I was concerned that others would follow their lead, effectively murdering our sleep from May to October. The…
