Country diary: Spring is here – a mad mix of joy and discipline | Paul Evans

The Marches, Shropshire: The call of the chiffchaff and the turning of the allotment soil – these are seasonal rituals honed over time A pair of ravens, barking mad, perform their shuttling flight in glorious sunshine above Old Racecourse Common. A charm of chaffinches flash white wing-bars through the shadows of mossy willows around the pond. A queen red-tailed bumblebee orbits a hedgebank boundary stone, then buzzes off to feed on gorse flowers or prospect for possible colony chambers below. A lesser-spotted woodpecker hammers out rapid bursts of drumbeats from a stand of beech across the misty distances of the hills. Chiffchaffs find their rhythm in the oaks. These constantly repeated two-note phrases are not what they seem when you hear the writer and musician Mark E Smith say of his own work: “It’s not repetition, it’s discipline.” A chiffchaff flies out from tree cover, across the open common, an apparition so slight compared with the powerful, hidden voice, to resume their discipline in further oaks. A tree stump, once carved into a small throne, its heartwood now rotted by fungi into crumbling fragments, reminds me of an eighth-century Chinese poem by Meng Chiao:

Mar 26, 2026 → Mar 26, 2026