Where's the cuckoo?

By now, in most years, we would have heard a cuckoo calling in the woods behind the house. Late April and early May is the time when the male cuckoo's distinctive sound confirms that spring is turning into early summer. Not this year though. The woods are empty, for now, of cuckoo calls.

Sadly, so is this pretty little cuckoo clock that hangs in our hall. I bought it on a trip to the Geneva Motor Show when our daughter was a baby. She's now 25. For some reason the mechanism has gone wrong and the clock keeps stopping, so it's time for another trip down to the wonderful repairers in Wrotham who recently mended our old station clock that hangs on the kitchen wall.

I hope a real cuckoo announces his presence soon. These distinctive birds are only here for about 10 weeks before they are off back to Africa around the latter part of July.