We have a new neighbour, and he is a crow. I was mothered by a woman who doesn’t like the flapping of wings, and the only times I would see her ruffled was on the rare instances that a confused sparrow would make its way into the kitchen on a warm spring day, or a magpie would get stuck in the chimney. Such things seem impossible now, to my little urban mind, but they definitely happened during my rural upbringing.

The crow is tame or courageous or unbothered. M says he first encountered him picking over the remnants of a dead rat that appeared on our front path one morning (these things happen every year or so. I am eternally grateful that M is the one to discover and, near-immediately, deal with them). Perhaps, he says, the crow is hopeful that more dead rats will appear. But I think there is something else going on. Sometimes the crow sits on the steps. Sometimes he sits on the fence post. Sometimes he is hopping around in the window-box that is desperate to be planted up with something. But he has taken ownership over our front yard and I am quite happy about it, not least because the spot used to be dominated by a furious and skulking black and white cat.

Derek Jarman also had a friendly crow, who pops up in Modern Nature, his exemplary diary of building a garden in Dungeness in the wake of his life-ending diagnosis of AIDS. I see no horizon from our home, we are far from the sea, but we have pebbles that could be shingle and I painted the bike shed black a few summers back. The crow has beady eyes and a not un-friendly demeanour. On cold days we come home all bundled up, C rosy-cheeked, and he’s there, hunched into his feathers. “Hello, Crow!” I say. One day he might squawk back.

Other good things this week: ...