Z Swallows at Crianlarich

Autumn in August

Who could have imagined that? There my dad once came rather reluctantly, I think, to play cricket with me with a bat too big. It was a great place for conkers too. So, one loganberry takes me back through summers long ago to my autumn now. The taste still tingles.

John Randall

Swallows at Crianlarich

The sleeper shuffles into Crianlarich on a grey morning, eyes not quite open yet. Stepping onto the platform, I feel air from the hills splash like fresh water in my face

and am startled by a world full of wings: swallows swooping round the station, small bodies that jink and dart over the down platform, past tearoom signs and tubs of late-summer flowers, across lines stretching south to Glasgow, rails running north across Rannoch Moor – dancing as though delighted, maybe with the morning midge-rise, or simply with all that air,

sending out urgent messages on twitter, low-flying, then looping over and up to gather on wires with fast-beating hearts: a new brood testing their wings in training for the long haul where lines converge on the horizon, connecting with another hemisphere.

And this in-between place where I’ve alighted, paused for breath, is where the tired year breathes out and blows them far away –where the young swallows’ journey starts.

Jan Sutch Pickard