You couldn't really see the sun – it was like a poached yolk hiding inside its white, but when it burst it would be something really special. Some birds were soaring, coasting high, high, trying to plash around up there in those esculent clouds but no, no, o! they would always cleave. But there was no sadness in that, for down below there was such fine green of so many vibrantly different kinds, and so many sturdy boughs and trunks beneath that, silver sinews and august umbers, some gymnastically betrothed, some straight and stoic. And there were rivers, sparking and slicing through the landscape like liquid knives, and ancient lumpen cows chewing, woollen and aloof, rapt by prehistoric philosophies. There were single walls half-standing reclaimed by ivies, stained by the water's chalky sobs. And, to remind you it was autumn, for you could not have told by the casual heat, sycamore seeds pirouetted to the ground and leaves of silver and umber flickered briskly down. Yet there were also teeming butterflies – of meadow brown, cabbage white and admiral red – so only gravity owned the pleasure of announcing plant from insect.

Two small, sleek, dark dogs asserted their solidity against this joyous, rhythmic mass and one, giddy with the redolence of underleaves, forgot himself too long. When he looked up at last they had gone, gone, his dearest ones, and so he braced himself with a wriggle of his haunches and torpedoed off, a black bullet honed on love. And that was why the birds were singing.

The sun at last revealed itself and Super Mario clouds chased like catamarans across the flat sea of the sky.