I am lying in the garden, gazing up into the blue evening. Colour is draining from the world. Occasional swifts magically appear against an elongated cloud which sets me in mind of the white horse at Uffington. These lonely creatures are the last stragglers of an abolished world. Like competitors in Logan's Run, they seem to whirl up screaming into a vortex of extinction. I have lived here long enough to remember that ten years ago there would have been double the numbers there are now. And ten years before that, many, many more filled the skies. I remember them. Almost every street supported a colony of swifts, house martins or swallows - can you imagine how they would have animated summer evenings? It is difficult to convey to those not then living, the depth and breadth of the natural world as it was. You can't even begin to think it, but in the not too distant past, night was thick with life. Like the swifts, funnelling the sky, one inhaled invertebrates with the night air. But that vast depth of existence, is gone now… I remember it, but it is difficult to communicate its absence. Today, nature is thinned out like a stretched and torn skin. Every bug shocks with its isolated appearance, seeming like an ambassador of its lost civilisation, standing in as the last of another lost tribe. Suddenly, I am roused to a state of alertness by the swift’s departure from my field of vision… I sit up. Night is gathering. I have become a sentinel, a watcher. But I am unsure of the territory behind me, never mind what lies in front. As the lights go on in my neighbours’ houses, I see that something malign is already inside. I understand that looking to defend a shrinking island of what has long since been forfeited is not an adequate response. By force of habit, I turn my gaze up and outwards, looking for the approach of unfamiliar dangers, but it seems even my vigilance is too late.
