I was working with the bees, which, in the life of a writer, is shorthand for saying I was in the garden with a book, reclining among the flowers on a sun lounger, when the amazing incident occurred. I still can’t entirely believe it happened. It was a Wind in the Willows kind of day. Everything was deliciously drowsy. The sky was a calm reach of wide water, and the cooling breeze lent the feel of being by a lake or on the bank of a slow river. Which, incidentally, is the normal kind of habitat for a kingfisher, and not our small back garden. So when a sudden shrillish creeh! was followed by a flash of blue and orange, I couldn’t credit that a kingfisher had just landed on our guttering. Must be a canary, I thought, wrong-headedly, before correcting myself: a parrot. Yes, I re