Dogs bark repeatedly and the sound fades from two farmyards away. A cow’s moo is calling attention to something unknown to me. Birds in the pine trees behind chirp and chirrup. Surrounding sounds are Dolbyesque, as the evening birdsong warbles through the air. A sheep bleats summonsing her lambs in the rushy field with the puncauns of purple moor grass.

A midge alights onto my nose and parades around a classified nostril as if it were a military parade ground, and then, without a salute or a signal, joins the air corps, and is off. The next one is curious about eyebrow hair; air force landing markings, stripes not lost on me either. The lens of my spectacles host another jump jet, as if my lens were a battleship air-craft carrier cruising through the air. My hand is drawn to my face to quell an itch; while a beetle settles on the whiter page, next for my scriptures, and draws in its underwings. Shrone sides washed with eye tear fluid soothes most irritations, except for the earlobes and inter thumb and palm skin. As I am wearing a poly tail, the back of my neck is accessible too, but not frequented by the flying squadrons, delicate hand rubs, over raspy bristle of my filtrum and cheek to chin jowls releases an itch which migrates around my core with perniciously high frequency. Hand signals, skin rubbing, hand clasping, pencil gripping writing aside, my other hand is fully occupied assuaging my forehead, inevitably disturbing stray hairs from my hair band and pony-tailed mop. One alighted up a trouser leg, the irritating bastard, and then a single hair from my head scribbled like a quivering stencil of an electrocardiogram meteing out a pattern below my spectacles on my stiff upper lip. In this Battle of Britain, nostrils, caverns of lubricosity are no deterrent to air-borne raids. My spectacles, with pads perched on my shrone, are rearranged, while the sound of the door closing warns me of the haste of my potential discovery, gallivanting, writing in pleain aeir, in the evening. The sun descends below the last cloud on the skyline, in an incandescent stripe of cadmium yellow, through a canopy of Birch above some yellow irises, green crocodile green, compared with the rushes in the foreground with their Saint Brigid’s cross florets and leaf tussocks like hedgehogs.

Nettles in the foreground too, make for wandering off-line, memorable. Now my supported leg is numb from the immobility of sitting in a captain’s chair composing this. The numb sleepy leg is immune to midges. Meanwhile a new irritation emerges between my big toe and the sandal strap, appealing for a foot massage to bleat it out of its misery. A ewe calls for sundown and her lamb bleats in response. The air squadron is thinning out. A bumble bee flies towards the sunset and irises. Thistles not yet out, and a few days short of blooming profusely, where the bumble bee flew from, he was heading, what is now upwind, as the sky darkens, and the cadmium line is expunged by a darker humid cloud.

Combs are my favourite hand tool. A body shop one graces my sporran. My thumbs and fingers massage my right foot’s toes, tugging at nails, removing stray skin flakes and otherwise soothes my anesthetized foot. Adidas striped pool slippers rest in the sheep-grazed grass, while in my right ear a battalion hisses and wing warps tiny sonic booms.

The skyline of Sitka Spruce holds a marvelous lilac clouds behind, while a droplet sensed, signals the advance of a low cloud from the west. Hairs on my skin, above my tarsals, are tugged by my sandal strap. A bugger has negotiated the boulder choke of the kneecap and joint and is now ensconced under my left hock, provoking a complete rearrangement of me in my chair. My numb foot, my numb butt, the groans of my bamboo chair in my resettling, tarsal squadrons, neck squadrons, hand pencil holding dynamic reactive squadrons clear for take-off. Ley grass with opposite florets with palea, glumes, lemma and short awns, wave in response to disturbance. A middle distance dipteran or micro-moth rises first white, and darkens as the sky becomes its backdrop.

Back at the house, Bran is incapable of chewing a carrot quietly. Meal time noises at a silent monastic refectory are politely tolerated, but Bran takes the biscuit. A midge in my ear never left the hangar, for his evening exercises. This was the last midge that lived before being rolled up into a Lake Victoria, Ugandan pate, what the dog might eat.