Last evening, around five I went across to get a jiffy bag from the book store at one end of the Long Barn. (You don`t have to use your imagination, there is a photo of the LB - look at the side bar.) It was just growing dusk - and haven`t the nights drawn out ?- and as I approached the barn I held my breath. From the far end of it lifting off from a beam high in the roof and coming absolutely silently towards me, was the Barn Owl who lives there, floating like a ghost into the dark spaces among the rafters where his nesting box is sited. I had clearly disturbed him just as he was preparing to go out for his night`s hunting. I went into the book store without switching on the light and I sat there in a conveniently placed rickety old armchair which has been put into that limbo between the House and the Skip and waited barely breathing, for about 20 minutes, feeling quite like Bill Oddy. The owl took no chances and the waiting game was tense on either side but it paid off. I heard the bump as he jumped lightly down from the rafter to the beam, a pause, and then  he flew down, right in front of my open door on his great wide white wings and off towards the cherry orchard. But it was the sight of him coming towards me that was so amazing, his heart shaped face, huge eyes and curved beak so exactly like every picture you ever see of a Barn Owl - which I know is a silly thing to say. And yet it is not. They are so beautiful and strange and somehow you think the photographs must cheat. But they don`t, they don`t.

At about the same time today, I was wondering if I might look out of the window to see if he was setting off, when the two Border Terriers began to go beserk, shrieking and screeching and racing up and down the stairs and then trying to get out of the double doors that lead from kitchen to terrace, hurling themselves at the glass. I raced down from the study in time to see what it was they were having hysterics about. The terrace was a swarming mass of hounds. The hunt was all over the garden and as usual had lost control of their dogs which were eating the bird crusts and trampling among the snowdrops with the big feet and generally having a whale of a time.

The BTs continued to hurl themselves, the hounds ignored them, and a second or two later, the horn for Going Home sounded out across the cherry orchard. I could just make out the last riders streaming down, hear the galloping hooves and they were gone into the gathering dusk.

Whether the barn owl was amongst them I could not say.