In these physically isolating times we still endeavour to heed E. M. Forster’s advice to ‘only connect.’ There’s much current advice out there too, on how best to cope positively with imposed isolation at home, and I won’t replicate it. I’ll just connect by sharing a little of my early morning Sunday walk by the River Exe. The sun was just coming up and a blackbird was singing gloriously from a roof top; further on I heard a song thrush, then two raucous magpies (yes two for joy!) Then joy there was indeed as I spied a grey heron fishing from the river bank, so serene and elegant! As I neared home I saw ‘our’ pair of swans were at their new nest – their last year’s trio of cygnets now fully grown and at last independent. And all this as the sun lit up the delicate greens of new leaves on hawthorn and willow, while the ash buds were dark and full, yet to burst into leaf. And everywhere primroses, celandine, stitchwort – and some wild garlic!