We had watched the swallows in the hotel car-park, marvelling at their mastery of the air and swift, graceful flight and delighting in the first, tentative flutters as the baby swallows left the nest for the first time. We have had some beautiful encounters with swallows, but this was special. You could feel the excitement as the babies tumbled gracelessly from their perch, expecting to emulate their parents and finding they had no idea what to do with their wings. They came to land in the most inappropriate places and I had been down and ushered one of the stranded babies out of the path of the cars.

One crash-landed on the little balcony outside the window and we watched, with some concern, its refusal to move at all. Still, it was a rare and beautiful thing to watch through a crack in the curtains as the parent birds flew…