I stand, shrink. The web of grasses and bare earth awaken the soles of my shoeless feet. There is the sweet, toe-flexing coolness of dew. Figs are falling like tears, and dawn is delicately cast with the first inklings of autumn. Hundreds of Swallows and Martins call and swirl, lifting my chin and heart and taking my mind far from the heavy weight that is the myopia of humanity. Where on Earth are we headed? The birds are bound for Africa. It is another survival master-class before the great departing, and the young, new to the wing, follow the adults as they swoop at pace to gracefully scoop water into beaks from our reservoir; a fine, perilous art that takes time to master, and the fledglings smash the mirror surface repeatedly, somehow hauling themselves back into the air. I stand by in case of disaster, net at the ready, but there is none. Not today. I cannot stand constantly at the edge of the water, with the fathomless mountains and forest to my back, much as I would choose to, and so yesterday I found a drowned novice that will not be journeying to Africa. It will feed a rose instead. The cacophony, movement and colours flood all the quicker the more I slow. I diminish some more as context grows. The heat builds, the birds retire to the phone wire and I wander back to the shadow cast by the farmhouse, through the olive grove and via a far smaller open-top irrigation container where the bees love to drink but occasionally flounder. A finger is dipped for them to climb onto. My increasing need is to journey, to cut the distance between me and nature. Is that a Sardinian Warbler on the woodpile? I sit on a frail chair, unable to go back into the house. Ants have found the unwashed dogs’ bowls, hazels are falling in slow motion like the figs, time has almost stopped. In a flash the monarch of headlong life, the kingfisher, takes a goldfish and shakes the world out of its dream. The garden table made from rubbish tip salvage still holds the loud echo of a recent lunch when Jen the cat curled in the guitar case and was serenaded to sleep. How sustaining to carry plates outside, far from plugs, with eternity for a ceiling, to be fed on sometimes gentle, sometimes profound conversation marinated in good food and harmony. I have never been more certain - reinforced constantly by the Mediterranean insistence of giving time for food and, hence, family - that by sitting down together daily to eat will be the saving of us, the disconnected species; so loud, so fat in the self-conscience, so short-sighted and increasingly distant from our roots and the real world; as we all must surely sense, a social species in desperate need to find a way back to family and community, to communication across the generations, to respect, tolerance and goodwill. Yes, the invaluable security and worth of tables, where we can all be comfortable, belong, fit, share, listen, learn. That old garden table keeps giving. Joe told us as we ate of a recent meeting at the old fish market in town. On the Low Road, as it has been known since Gothic days, close to the crowd of smiles at the ice-cream parlour (home-make, to expire for) stands a void between the tall terraced houses. All that is left is the gateway bearing the faded words of past scents and bustle – Pescaderia. Joe was translating this for a visitor. An elderly gentleman, a stranger to us, stepped out of a nearby house and slowly made his way to Joe’s shoulder. He was neither invisible nor uneasy about talking to young people he did not know. I remember when it was bombed, he said. It was in 1938 at the end of the civil war. I was a young boy. I was in my bedroom and I heard the whistling of the first bomb. There was a flash and the glass of the window blew in. My mother ran into my room and we raced down into the cellar. We did not know where my brother was. More bombs fell on our house and the fish market and we were trapped for days. I never saw my brother again.