So true, Gilbert, so very, very true: 'castration...' really does as you say in your letter, '...have a strange effect...'. Difficult, if not actually impossible, to work up a counter argument that it does n't. It just does. Never the same. No way back. But that's another story.

Gilbert, by the way, is the Gilbert White of the Natural History of Selborne fame, and it was thumbing through an illustrated copy of that book in Cheapside Daunts earlier this evening where I found this sentence beginning a letter to one of his correspondents. He, then, elegantly takes this image , and explores it's effects across a range of fauna, including, unsurprisingly, men.

There's no question, for me at least, that this is possibly one of the most original (and wince inducing) openings to a letter ever. But it's not the first genuinely different approach to a letter I've seen today. Proof, in a small way, that lightening can strike twice in the same place. 

The other example is from a letter of condolence written by Samuel Beckett, and then discovered by one of my friends and circulated on Facebook. 

Condolence letters are the hardest and as such vulnerable to well meaning cliche. And why should n't they be...after all they're written with passion, sometimes in haste, and too often in a struggle to get the right tone. Beckett's letter, however, is a masterpiece of simplicity and profundity. A template in thoughtfulness and humility, affection and sympathy. 

Here it is: "I know your sorrow and that for the likes of us there is no ease from the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow's fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds". 

"Nothing has done more to retard the progress of the human race than the exaltation of submission into a high and noble virtue...it may often be expedient to submit; it may even be sometimes be morally right to do so in order to avoid a greater evil; but submission is not inherently beautiful - it is generally cowardly and frequently morally wrong". 

From the 1911 book, Women's Fight for the Vote, written by Fred Pethick-Lawrence, husband of the famous suffragette, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. 

There are places that are so rich in treasures that what would be a pearl elsewhere is merely mundane there. It's lustre dimmed by a much brighter constellation. Some places are lucky enough to be just that.

 Step forward, RSPB Lakenheath. It's you I'm talking about. Yesterday was a day of glories. Birds that would turn heads and have people running to see seemed so common there as to be relegated to the sidelines by things even more exotic

 The reeds, the woods, the sky, everything was alive.Trembling with extravagance in the guise of the red footed falcon performing just like a trapeze artist; tumbling and rolling, soaring, swooping, diving, and revealing it's wonderful anthracite body and blood red legs. Legs that are honed and like grappling hooks; several times it used them to snatch a dragonfly out of the air, and like in flight refuelling, flip it's legs up so the beak could tear into the insect. It was one of the most reflexive actions I've ever seen. Pure instinct. Spot, catch, devour. 

Swifts were so abundant that the ponds were almost hazy with the blur of birds streaking at little over head height. At another, house martins flew low enough to momentarily break the surface of the water and grab the tiniest sip to drink before veering at right angles to pluck an insect. 

Above us only clouds sang John Lennon. Above us yesterday was a cavalcade of Hobbies and Marsh Harrier. These are birds that many bird watchers fall into a swoon simply thinking about let alone see.  At Lakenheath, they're like buses, always one trundling across the skyline. We counted seven at one point: quartering the ground, spiralling up and down, and once a pair passing food between each other. 

I am increasingly convinced now that some birds virtually play to the gallery; they know they are magnificent, they know their worth as rarities and blow in migrants, and just like starlets on the beaches at Cannes, they promenade for the paparazzi. They perform, they tease, they excite. As the Savi's warbler so clearly did. We heard it's rattlesnake like song, imagine dried peas being shaken in a tube, a few long grass stalks quiver, a bush vibrate and then the slow reveal: the branches parted and there it was in full view ready for it's close up shots. The paparazzi responded perfectly: motor drives whirring, lens poked out, volley upon volley of photographs taken. 

All the time this was going on, marsh harriers were circling nearby, and no one bothered to even look their way. An embarrassment of riches. 

The moment has to be circling closer and closer to actually happening when the general body of Islamic thought and feeling begins the energetic and strenuous counter offensive that takes ownership back from the zealots, the fanatics, and the bigots, who in their extraordinarily benighted way have made this religion a synonym for backwardness and brutality.

Is this reconstruction really going to happen? Are people going to transform for modernity, for sanity and for sheer safety, Islam's public image the rest of us currently dread?

Are there pockets of people, from the thinkers, from the writers, out of the quotidian believers, who are embarked on this redemptive journey? I've only seen one article so far that's courageously discussing the need to even do this  - note the needed, not the direct evidence it's actually happening. Everything else has been the usual arms in the air platitudes: 'it's not the real face of Islam...it's a religion of peace...generosity of spirit...hospitality...graciousness' and so on. We need to see that dimension. When?

The reformation has to happen. Can I expect to see a Martin Luther style event with a manifesto nailed figuratively to mosque doors that says we have to restore our name? This reformation is essential: morality, spirituality and public safety implore it.

If it only it was that easy, of course; there's something else to tackle. Why are so many damaged, insecure, anxious, overwrought individuals drawn to easy answer solutions. Well, it's obvious in the final words of the previous sentence - easy answer solutions. I have not come across any religion or belief systems that does not somewhere state explicitly or for inference that it's not your fault. You are not to blame, someone else is. Solidarity through a sense of victim hood then takes over. I've seen it everywhere, and it's particularly prevalent in Christianity and Islam. You are not responsible. You are done to. Again, as I look for Islam to recover it's centre, I look to people to have the courage to examine, discuss, understand and resolve personal issues through their own agency.

And yet again, if only it was that simple. It's not. The vulnerable, the afflicted, have to be coaxed, they have to be given the confidence, and the tools - I look to education, emotional intelligence especially, and to jobs here - that they can be the masters of their own destiny. Not someone else's.

It's got to happen. Just when?

A world without religion. It'd be worth it. We'd all be better off. End the mania, stop the hysteria, it's an infection. It's driving people mad. A near decapitation in broad day light in Woolwich in front of scores of people committed by two young men crazed with absurd, repugnant, plain wrong beliefs. Possesed. And to have the temerity to apologise on camera that people had to see it!

Is a day like today unthinkable? No it's not. We exist under this hovering terror every day. The cause is religion. These people are obessesive, fanatical, without even a scintilla of empathy; wedded instead to some extraordinary solipsism that what they do is right. Impossible. An insufferable vile arrogance.

I still can't believe that this happened. A world without religion: free from the terrible expression of someone's perverted world view. It is the interpretation of these damn ideologies that mean a life of horror, constraint, misery, fear, intolerance and straight terror for all of us. What else could it be when Islam and Christianity are predicated on blood sacrifice. This is tyrannical, culturally, mentally, emotionally  oppressive. Centuries of this and what have we gained? Merciless, senseless killing on London streets.

Takes time (and a free ticket from a friend) but I've finally made it to a performance at Holland Park opera. Not a Tosca or Madame Butterfly style event; this was a rehearsal, and a robust, strong one of Oklahoma, put on by an equally robust, strong choral society made up of past and present of Allen and Overy, a powerhouse in the legal world. Gorgeous, rousing work, with enough echoes to have me warbling some of the show tunes on my way home.

The venue is a little work of wonder; they've made the most of a wartime ruin and fastened an enormous marquee around it, where the shadows of swooping parakeets zip over, the odd eerie cry of the park's resident peacocks wander in, and the music and tunes thump on.

At one point, very briefly, as if a door had popped open, I saw back into the past and thought of all the previous versions of Oklahoma that London has hosted. Somewhere trapped in a West End theatre is the happy ghost of a Rodgers and Hammerstein tune riffing through.

Should I applaud laziness as much as I do? Answer? No. Yesterday morning when I woke up with an almost fully formed critique of the developing feud between the two titans of nationalist politics  in the UK: the sinister clown from UKIP, which is basically, an English nationalist party in aim, sentiment, and sense of victim hood, and the cleverer Machiavelli who squats in triumph north of the border. Both fill me with horror by the way; our united kingdom, this crazy little archipelago feels uncomfortably as if we are nearing some version of the collapse of Yugoslavia.

That critique lies buried somewhere in the rubble of another day's memory because I did n't write it down. I thought about it, but again intention trumped action. Again.

"Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use to shrink wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead" 
Arundhati Roy.

I've been waiting for this moment with more keenness than I could ever have imagined feeling a few years ago - the Swifts are here. They're back! Over London. Now it really feels like Summer is little more than a few minutes away.

On my long meander home from work this evening, I suddenly found myself under a rolling, boiling cloud of them freewheeling near the Serpentine. Just like a gang of cats in a net bag, they were careering in all directions; feinting, tumbling, soaring, biting, and snapping at what must be a mist of aerial plankton too fine for us on the ground ever to see.

Their rubber duck  soprano squeak of a call means there's another citizen of the air about. With those squeals, shrieks and swoons, they could be characters out of a steamy bodice ripper. It's drama, it's extravagance, it's passion, it's operatic.

Of the four acrobats who dominate the skies of summer, they are the last to arrive: Sand Martins are always the metaphorical early birds, next comes the Swallow, followed by House Martins, and then cannoning across the stage, the final act, which is for me always the most rousing and dramatic - enter the Swifts. Unforgettable. How mercury skits so wildly across water mirrors to a tee the excitement of the swifts scorching across the sky. Now if they could only leave a vapour trail...

And the sky is their true home; everything happens there, eating, sleeping, mating; the only thing that happens on terra firma is egg laying. Add incredible to unforgettable; these birds are truly amazing.

 I've been reading the daily reports in the London Bird wiki on the returning migrants; every day, something new, something closer to where I live. This is the bird I've been waiting for. I am ecstatic. Summer est arrive, or as near as damn it. 

The slogan yesterday was dejeuner sur l'herbe; London loafed. Me too. A very idle afternoon, sauntering and snacking with a friend through an almost Mediterranean warm Kew Gardens. 

Bathe me in green any time you want. That colour - Kew's default - soothes me like no other does. Colour derives it's property from the light spectrum going by the Wikipeadia entry. So it does, but yesterday it was a sensory lullaby for me; I fell asleep on the grass just like a middle aged version of Huck Finn, even had a hat tipped over my face to keep the sun off and mimic the night. Slept like a baby walrus by all accounts. Dormir sur l'herbe. 

Somehow SWALEC has confused my bill with a steelworks. There's no way I could have consumed that much power. Seriously...come on...

I'm amazed at the number of units they say I've used. Yep, know that wholesale gas prices, blah, blah, blah have gone up and that translates into higher end user costs...but this is incredible. Over the edge from merely extraordinary and into somewhere all together new.

If I was singlehandedly powering all the lights in Times Square, then I could just about accept it, but a Hobbit sized studio flat in West London? Summat not right...

I wrote about Dungeness as an English version of Prospero's island and tonight in my meandering way home, I read about another candidate, one much nearer to the image of Shakespeare's ideal: Cyprus.

An island in the news for all the wrong reasons: an economy driven over the cliff, seething social pressures as a consequence, and the will they / won't they spectre of could they leave the euro stalking the land. And in my imagination as an isle of utter wonderment; a fascination driven on with every page I read of 'Journey through Cyprus', Colin Thubron's superb and seductive travelogue. I am burning to go.

I've been wanting to go to Dungeness for a long time. I finally made it yesterday.

 It is the bleakest headland I've ever been on; and in some ways the most sinister, with a quietly throbbing nuclear power plant brooding like some petrified giant of the forest dominating the background and which is never quite out of eyeshot. Wherever you are so is it. 

But it has beauty; this long, deep pebble beach has a spare, haunting quality, which for me, was utterly intoxicating; the sky was pure aquamarine, startlingly blue; everywhere there's spiky yellow gorse, tied down with long anchoring roots to stop it being torn out like twisters do trees in Kansas from the harrying sea winds that probe into every nook and cranny of this massive shingle beach. The vegetation is low, thick, matted, like a tough, hard wearing carpet.

At times it felt as if, and looked as if, we were by the cote d'azur; the sun was high and the pools that fill the old workings were deep and clear, like ice green emeralds. And at the same time, it also felt like the last of England: where the survivors of some apocalyptic event (the Anglo version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, perhaps) had fled to, with the power station being the only reminder of a now extinct civilisation.

It's certainly the place where people must be living off the grid. Like the driftwood that reaches the long pebble beach, so it is for those souls who wish to disconnect and lead another existence. They land there.

The perpetual flush of the sea, pushing the pebbles along the shore to it's own symphony of sound must be manna for those who want nothing but to hear the roar, crash and hubbub of nature. And you hear that in the birds that adore Dungeness: gulls roost on the lip edges of building in the power complex and cut dramatic outsize shadows against the building walls as they wheel and turn in the afternoon sun. Spring's first sand martins and the odd pioneer swallow cut arabesques through the sky. Full bodied ravens strut like country squires. Warblers yell like market stall holders or explode like car alarms from every bush.

A little way off the beach is the warm water outfall from the power plant; just like a dishwasher churning or the mythical maelstrom, it's frothing kettle of spume and water, which the gulls and dive bombing terns love, feasting on the fish attracted in their turn by the warm water.

The notion came to me as we wandered over the headland, first by the long pebble ridge, then across each of the nature reserves on this magical land that Dungeness is really the world's largest Japanese rock garden. It has the harmony and the serenity of a zen garden. Untouched. Natural. Forever. Yet, and this is the ever present irony of nature, what the waves bring, they can take away. The crumbling coasts of eastern England testifies to that. And, of course, there is the squat, humming presence of Dungeness A and Dungeness B as man's tacit contribution to instability.

Yet, I could live there. That frontier like quality so appeals to me. Few places have invited me to contemplation in the UK; this is one of that tiny group. I can fully understand why Derek Jarman headed south and set up a homestead. His "Prospect Cottage" is a tiny gem in black shingle. Fronted by a garden which reflects the austerity of the area - driftwood, flotsam, hardy plants, pebble cairns, minature standing stones - again, in a dreamy, zen fashion which fits so aptly the sensibility of this modern day Prospero's island. And the piece de resistance: the first verse of John Donne's "The Sunne Rising" marked out in raised lettering on the cottage's black tarred western wall.

I've thought for some years now that to leave garden behind is a gesture of the greatest generosity. A present for the generations yet to be born. Designed and created by people who may well, and I think particularly of Prospect Cottage and Chiswick House gardens here, never see it in it's realised state of exultant beauty. What existed on paper for them exists in front of our eyes. What a great legacy.

"I want all my friends to come up like weeds, and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don't want the kind of friends one has to cultivate"
Roger Deakin. Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.

I've said this many times. Whether I've written it down is moot. I'm never homesick. My sickness is to come home. To a job I don't particularly enjoy; to worries about neighbours; frets about what I should do to my flat (sell and leave the stresses of living here to someone else) or more likely what I won't do (sell).

I know I'm psychically running away from all the decisions that have to be made, which will  and I can see this, probably make my emotional life easier to bear in some ways, but, and ain't there always a big one of this: travelling, even the thought of it, is just so damn exhilarating.

Sarajevo. Are the two of us in love? Hard to say on such a brief encounter - three nights, four days - but there's definitely chemistry between us. Something to build on.

What I had n't realised, and, really, how can you from the media and photographs, is exactly how much of a cauldron Sarajevo is in; long, narrow, and somewhat spatulate as it fans out towards the airport, and completely overlooked by hills and then a backdrop of snow topped mountains. Nor had I realised how close the frontline actually was, in places it must have been the other side of the street. It  can only have been an unimaginable three year hell encircled, besieged and shelled relentlessly.

Yet, the city has recovered incredibly. New buildings, many, many more restored, with only a handful or so in the city centre still bearing the scars of war, or in case still a hollowed out shell. Again, my hat and my respect goes out to these brave, resilient Sarajevans.

The city is a little gem: studded with minarets, clanging with hardy looking trams, and home to the tallest building in the whole of the Balkans - the Avaz tower. I spent a good part of one morning revelling in the view from the tower's open observation deck, baking in the heat.

Walking longitudinally across Sarajevo is a journey through spiritual as much as secular architecture: from the UN lookalike of the Bosnian parliament building, the quaintly Yugoslav communist functional buildings - all right angles and wide steps - on to imperialist statement buildings thrown up by the Austro-Hungarians - very formal, Viennese fussy - and then the bee hive that is Bascarsija - the old town.

Bascarsija is where generations of people have lived, traded, prayed, wept, bought, fought, laughed, ingested endless thimblefuls of coffee. Designed for meandering, created for chance meetings and conjecture. I felt ghosts every step of the way. Every flagstone throws up a story. The walls breath, the mosques exhale stories. So where are they? Who's the chronicler?

Only I can see this through: let this be the year I sell my flat. I need space. I need quiet. I need greenery. I need respite from the unease this area generates.

There are many things I hope for and this is one: why won't the BBC man up and take on the Daily Mail. If there was just some organisation, some entity which would square up to the Mail's bullying. I dream of this. A direct challenge string enough to turn this basilisk into stones or at least clip it's wings.

The near compulsory public tribute offered to the former prime minister who died three days ago - hyper ventilating press (Usual suspects. No surprises) and the forced recall of parliament for what must have been a buttock numbing seven or so hours for the non believers wearily listening to the cult members effusions - has put the UK shoulder to shoulder with the other country dominating the media sphere. North Korea. Brothers in arms when it comes to hot torrents of strident rhetoric

We have in the space of a few days become the unwilling participants in a cheesy, grisly personality cult. Thank God, I'm out of the country when this tawdry spectacle reaches it's apogee.

If the Tories start busing public servants in and coercing them to publicly weep a la Kim Jung Il then we are a truly pantomime country. They've already tried, but excused it away as a genuine mistake to get Whitehall staff to wear mourning clothes.

It seems that Cameron has no depth to which he won't plumb. Everything up to celebrate the passage of a former PM who left only division and despair in their wake. A scorched earth, put all prisoners to the sword raison d'être that many of us living through those times frantically hoped was an aberration never to be repeated. In the same passionate way probably as medieval monks must have prayed for deliverance from the Norsemen.

 Just that even though that rotten baton slipped out of one Tory hand it has been inelegantly, but enthusiastically, plucked out of the long grass by the current incumbent and the wand of despair benights us once more. 

Again, and I simply have to say it: I am ecstatic I'll be abroad next Wednesday.

So today was the day Margaret Thatcher died. I acknowledge her passing as I do her significance for some of my fellow citizens. That's all. The urge to pen vitriol has been contained. Just.