Diary – 2 August 2018

The swifts had not arrived by June, nary a one, though a Yorkshire Dales friend reported their return, and there were masses in France. I read that there was a national shortage, bird people were doing surveys and panicking. In the 1970s and 1980s, swifts wheeled round every church tower, dashed through the streets screaming. Not now. I could have wept. Possibly I did. Why had the French ones not crossed the Channel? Was this yet another thing to be blamed on Brexit? Then, one July evening, there they were a few, then dozens, soaring, diving, swooping, crossbows in the blue sky. I have abandoned work, reading, watering, even drinking my wine, to sit watching these most beloved hirundines. Gaze while you can. Neglect everything. These are not birds, they are angels.

How many times have I started to read Proust, In Search of Lost Time? We all long to revisit ‘those blue remembered hills’. I have often got as far as finishing Book 1 and starting Book 2; I know the first paragraphs, about the boy waiting for his mother to come and kiss him goodnight, by heart. Then I have become stuck — another book has intervened and seduced me away, maybe an ‘easier’, more exciting or urgent one, or else my stick-at-it power has failed. I resolved never to try again, but Proust was not letting go as The Brothers Karamazov or Ulysses let go, recognising a lost cause. Last week, I touched my 12 volumes of Proust again, the small hardbacks in their pale blue jackets, the Scott Moncrieff translation. I’ve had them for decades. I pulled out Book 1 yet again. Started. Continued. Now I am on Book 5, ‘The Guermantes Way’. A key turned in a lock and Proust was ready for me.