THERE was a time when the signs of summer included the trees bursting into full leaf, bats flitting across the dusk sky and the sound of the cuckoo calling from someone else's nest. Nowadays it's when the postmen start wearing shorts. Still, speaking personally I think I'd prefer the latter any day to the asthmatic call of the cuckoo. Mind you, I've spotted at least one postman on cold mornings who doesn't seem to have ever replaced summer shorts with winter warm trousers. They breed 'em tough in South East Cornwall. Oddly enough, we haven't had anyone report that they have heard the cuckoo this year, at least none I've noticed. There was a time when we were inundated with first cuckoo call spotters, or more properly hearers, each person getting earlier and earlier until you got those who had apparently heard it on Christmas Eve. That they were on their way home from the pub was a possible explanation. There are also those who aren't able to distinguish the call of the wood pigeon from the cuckoo, and there was once someone who rang up and did bird imitations over the phone to indicate the different sound. Fortunately, I've worked in this office long enough never to be surprised by anything, certainly not someone softly calling 'coo coo' down the telephone. Then I had someone ring and say that he had seen his first cuckoo. 'Don't you mean heard?' I said. No, he said, he meant seen, and went on to give a description of the bird he had spotted. I couldn't argue with him, because although I've lived in the country nearly all my life I don't think I have ever seen a cuckoo. Not knowingly. But then they are clever birds, avian Walter Mittys who are born in someone else's nest, callously left there by their parents, and are apparently never told they are adopted by their foster parents. Indeed, their foster parents don't seem to notice that instead of six tiny sparrows they've got five little ones and an enormous great big one with a massive appetite. They probably shake their little birdy heads and wonder if they should cut down on the worms. If they were humans, cuckoos would be candidates for counselling by five years old and be on massive doses of Ritalin by the time they were ten. And here's something else. How do adult cuckoos ever find each other? There they are, abandoned before birth, brought up as sparrows, thrushes or blackbirds, or if they're really unlucky, seagulls. Come the time when girl birds and boy birds want to do what comes naturally how do cuckoos cope? They can't do it with little Sammy Sparrow that's for sure. They're faced with the sort of desperate situation that leads people to speed dating. This is obviously the explanation for the distinctive call. It's not heralding summer, it's a cuckoo sitting on a bush in the middle of the moor surrounded by sparrows shouting 'Halloo, is there anyone out there? I'm female, I'm a cuckoo too, where the hell are you?' But enough of flights of fancy and on to something completely different. From our sitting room the other day came the sound of what I might dub 'what goes around comes around' conversation. Having just staggered out of the garden after a hard day of digging, weeding and bean pole erection, all I wanted was a hot bath and some supper, so I ignored what was going on. It seemed, however, that it was concerning something granddaughter had done and daughter didn't like and one sentence I heard was: 'You can just take that off immediately.' 'Been there, done that,' I thought, and rushed up to claim the bathroom before anyone else, usually granddaughter, occupied it for the next two hours. It's a turning point of a child's life when instead of having to drag him or her screaming and kicking into the bathroom you have to drag them out screaming and kicking. I didn't see the reason for the somewhat heated conversation until the next day, when it wasn't difficult to spot, because it was atop my granddaughter's head and was blonde instead of its more usual dark brown. So this was what the fuss was all about. I was instantly transported back to the same age, or perhaps slightly younger, when I secreted a little package of hair dye about my person and sneaked into the bathroom. It was always called dye in those days, never tint, streak, colour or highlight. Neither did it have fancy names ie Neopolitan sunlight, Flamenco auburn etc. You had a choice of red, blonde, black, brown or maybe platinum. It was a bit like wine, which at that time only sold as red, white or pink and nobody minded which country it came from. I had chosen red, which promised a blaze of bright copper curls (my hair was straight at the time, but I didn't see the incongruity of this claim). I didn't take into account that the lighter your hair the brighter the dye. Sometime later I appeared out of the bathroom with hair the colour of what might be called subdued carrot, although if you were my mother it was a carrot too far. There ensued exactly the same conversation I heard on Sunday. Followed by a demand to see the package which had contained the dye and whereupon the words 'semi- permanent' led to an even more explosive encounter. I was forbidden to go to school the next day until some way was found to remove all traces of carrot. This involved several tries with other dyes trying to dull down my Belisha beacon head until my mother was partially satisfied and let me out in public again. I think that was my only teenage rebellion, apart from wearing white lipstick and once refusing to stand up for the national anthem in a cinema. As a parent I managed to forget my own experiments and we had the 'You can take that off immediately' conversations on many an occasion, and so it goes down the generations. These days it could be worse. My mother might have nearly fainted with horror at the sight of a ginger daughter but what on earth would have been her reaction to a pierced one or one with a naughty tattoo on her shoulder. Fortunately, I should hastily be said, or else I'll be the one being shouted at, it hasn't come to that in our house yet.
