A barbecue in early March in cold, grey, foggy London? Surely not. But yes, that’s just what happened yesterday – not grey fog but grilled fish, right in my garden. The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky; shorts and a sun-hat were in order. The barbecue was damp and full of old ashes from months of disuse. I emptied the mineral-rich grey ash on to my spinach bed, in the hope that some of the potassium will still be there to help the veggies along (potassium, potash, pot-ash … that was the reason for the name). Then I collected some tinder-dry dead twigs from the vine that grows on the fence, snapped them into short lengths, lit a pine-cone and arranged some charcoal all around. It smoked a bit but eventually lit, and quite soon was hot enough for the fish. A barbecue next to the first daffodils of spring – actually next to some outdoor hyacinths and primulas too. The cooking was accompanied by a group of magpies – there is a family of 7 of them living in our road, with a big twiggy nest in the tallest tree. They seem to offer intense predation pressure, yet the small birds – blue and great tits, dunnocks, wrens, blackbirds, robins – survive and breed successfully. They must be good at hiding. As for the weather, it does feel like yet another piece of evidence of out-of-season behaviour. Climate change? Who knows. But the weather is becoming predictably unpredictable – anything goes, except the ordinary. It reached 20 Celsius, by the way.