When the Lights Go Out

This is the first summer that I can ever remember, when I have not once, not once mark you, heard the unmistakable call of the Cuckoo. It is not surprising though is it? You only have to look around you at all the building that is going on, where there once was farmland all around. I have lived in this area for nearly sixty years and have always taken walks in the countryside sometimes with a family dog and sometimes on my own for the peace of it all.

 

For the past thirty years since my husband and I took up triathlon we have spent even more time out in the woods and over the farmland onto the South Downs. We live in a road called Toddington Lane and that was, what it was fifty years ago, a lane. There were no pavements, just grass verges. That is still the case but the grass verges have been eroded away with the increase in traffic from the two new estates that have been built all around us since we moved here. Thousands of new homes have been built and are still being thrown up at a scary rate of knots.

 

Our house is right in the middle of a completely blind zig-zag bend.  It was a country lane. The road now often looks and sounds like a race track. Long gone from the area, are the farm animals, that once grazed nearby, cows and sheep.

 

There used to be an abundance of pretty little birds in our back garden feeding from our antique bird table, Blue Tits, Goldfinches, Robins and Wrens. Now we hardly see those delightful little gems; instead we are lucky to see much more than Pigeons and Seagulls and Magpies.

 

The Cuckoo is now on the conservation Red list as are the Lapwings and the Yellow Wagtail. We used to see science fiction films about the end of the world and think how far fetched they were.

 

When I was a young girl, in Worthing when I left my school life on a Friday afternoon and started work on the following Monday morning; there was a man who used to walk around the town centre at the weekend with a placard hung over him that said in large letters, ‘THE END IS NIGH’.

 

It’s about time we stopped laughing before all the lights really do go out.