John Toal

Welcome to the podcast version of Sunday Masalini, which differs from the radio version for rights reasons.

We hope you enjoy the programme.

It was exactly a decade ago and I would ask the question of anyone who would listen.

What, I would ask, what could be sad about an empty nest?

Why isn't the empty nest syndrome a shorthand for joy?

I would elaborate that the bird watching websites explained that sometime, very early in the morning, when the blue tit nestlings were coming up to three weeks old...

They would leave the bird box by the little hole in the front, take their first flight and never return.

They warned me that it would be over in a matter of moments and I was unlikely to see it for myself.

So it was about eight in the morning and I was standing at the kitchen sink, sunlight glancing off the suds, yellow rubber gloves searching the basin for the last things to be washed.

When the garden filled up with an exhilarated, insistent, urging birdsong.

Yellowed gloves held aloft, I ran to the back door to see what the commotion was all about.

One, two, three, four blue-tipped fledglings catapulted from the bird box, somehow new to fly to the right towards the birch tree, and tumbled down through the twigs and branches until their new claws grasped a perch for the very first time and they joined the singing.

I couldn't smile widely enough to express my joy.

As I watched, I remembered the first time I realised in early spring that a pair of blue tits were bringing building materials in and out of what I thought was a garden ornament crudely tied to the fence, but they saw as home.

By May I reckoned the eggs had hatched and each morning I scanned the sky to see if the parents had survived the night, waiting to see them making their scooping flight across the neighbours' hedges, back to the fence where they perched above the nest box, checking all round before ducking in the entrance and ducking out again, back and forth, back and forth.

As hatchlings turned to nestlings, I would bring my coffee out in the morning sunshine to listen to the peep-peep-peep of the hungry chicks.

I was never alone in my vigil.

A mischief of magpies lined the roof ridge of the house opposite, one hopping foot to foot with impatience.

The neighbourhood cats were attracted to the garden like filings to a magnet, parading the perimeter with predatory intent.

And still the busy parents went back and forth, back and forth.