Sandy soil underfoot again, soft, but solid to the footfall. Strange that, despite the flatness, the social coldness, the parched and dying grass, the first thing that got me, that greeted me as being of home, was the soil. No more of the solid/sodden peat bog dynamic, sadly. The second thing, as I walked to the lake, was the sweating air, heaving with humidity, screaming with Swifts, darkening with clouds. Take a deeper breath and you’ll feel no fresher, just lethargic like everything else, waiting on the rain.

It starts to spit as we take positions beside the lake. A Stock Dove barrelled along the nearest hedgerow, a Sedge Warbler scratched out a few chords. Gulls, many, spiralled over the pig fields to the point of appearing like scratches, or tiny cracks in the clouds. Rain sets in, further smearing the coating of Hebridean sea-salt on the scope and splashing into the eyepiece. Lapwings still career around in hot pursuit of the mugging Crows, whilst Shelducks shelter their just-fledged broods. I suppose the rain is needed. A mere 8mm in recent months has browned the surrounding countryside. The crops are choked.

And that was when dad picked it up. The rain hadn’t brought it in; it had been unearthed at 4 minutes past 4 (exactly), as part of the small amount of inland migrating phalaropes. Spinning and swimming, the Red-necked Phalarope was typically hyperactive, picking up insects in gravity defying vortices. A male, we guessed, in it’s faded, battered rendition of the adult female’s stunning summer plumage, though in the weather everything had an insipid cast.

A Breckland gem. It carried on raining. Puddles filled up the pockmarked field edges, to which pigeons flocked to bathe. Darker light saturates the colours of the rape field, a bright banana yellow against Payne’s grey skies, towering high above and stretching to the horizon, whilst sprinkled red poppies fleck the field margins over which Swallows flit. And still the rain came.