Country Diary: Claxton, Norfolk

When I say I can smell winter, I'm not just talking about that curious astringent sensation at the bridge of your nose when you breathe in the sharp ice air. A north-easterly in our village brings with it a long, slewed line of vapor from the sugar-beet factory, and it spreads among the houses a stink that is one part pleasure, but two parts nausea.

When I say that this morning I heard the winter arrive, I'm not referring to my finger tapping at the mercury, nor the high clear notes of red wing in the garden. As I crossed the lawn they were panicked into flight from our holly trees and released a sound like air held under high pressure and escaping from a valve. Nor do I mean the delicious crunchy racket when I walk the wood almost completely bare of leaves. Today, rather, it was the gentle honking from a skein of Bewick's swans which crossed the sky to the west. How extraordinary that this reassuring murmur of contact notes will have enveloped them like a bubble all the way from northern Russia.

When I say that I can now see winter, I'm not thinking of the way clouds appear denser at this time of year and congeal towards evening, pressing down upon the horizon and squeezing the last light to a glorious band of pale magenta. Instead I have in my mind's eye that huge female peregrine. She sat on a gate in the middle of the field. She did almost nothing, except the head rotated those huge eyes, larger than my own, across the fields. Every other duck, goose or wader was potential prey, and it seemed as if the mood of this whole landscape was made tangible, each strand of the fabric ultimately converging in that falcon on its post. Any moment now she could just fly upwards and unleash upon us all the stark and beautiful craziness of a snowstorm.