Glad to be Alive!

Today I am watching swallows. They are so low over my head I could touch them. They slice and swoop and chatter and are impossible to photograph. Amongst them are stocky house martins weaving the late summer sky with a sound like laughter.

I should be at work, but I am still weak from a freak mushroom poisoning incident at a local restaurant. This wasn’t your ordinary food  poisoning experience: it involved crawling to the neighbours, an ambulance each and emergency hospitalisation. Everyone who ate the wild forest mushrooms had the same experience. We both feel like we have been hit with a brick and lucky to be alive.  We both know enough about fungi to know about the one that makes you sick, then you recover, then you suffer irreversible organ failure and die ( destroying angel), but as I am watching swallows, it looks like we didn’t eat that one!

Swallows are usually so far up you can hardly see them, but today they are feeding on the insects rising from my little patch of grassy, shrubby, flowery rich paradise. Things we take for granted sometimes come very close to remind us that they are there: sometimes it is summer birds, sometimes it is a brick called life!