Three magpies

One for sorrow,

Two for joy,

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy,

Five for silver,

Six for gold,

Seven for a secret never to be told.

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I was mid run when I realised that this place felt fairly strange. The tall purple grasses -  or flowers - unnameable and the heat unnatural. I was not sweating, and it seemed as if I were moving through a dream.

Earlier that day I'd scampered down the wooden staircase and plugged my phone in to charge in the kitchen and felt enveloped by the sense of strange. A dream version of it would make sense; imagine: in this dream I am walking by the canal in Singapore and all at once there is a travellator. I step onto it and keep walking, the grey heron flies above me and the otters squeak and play, and I am on a travellator but it is in an airport in China, and I am on a travellator but it is in an airport in London, and I step off the travellator and I am plugging a cable into my phone in a green and red kitchen after buying ingredients from Sainsburys.

Anyway, it was about then in my run that I saw the first magpie. "One for sorrow," I thought, "Keep going." About two hundred metres later there was another. Did that mean that two for joy, or just one more sorrow? Chasing a sub-6 minute per kilometre outcome, I wasn't going to pause and ponder it. Yet a few minutes later, another: a girl? Or another sorrow?

I asked Jacob about it in the kitchen, after I'd cried over shrink wrapped tempeh. He thought it depended on your outlook. Life's what you make of it? You could even, he said thoughtfully as he boiled the tender stem broccoli, take the first two as sorrows and the third as a girl, it depends how you look at it. I took that to mean that perhaps when the waves of homesickness come I am a sad, sad girl.

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This morning there were two magpies, and then another two. My brother told me that birds are angels in disguise, and I felt moved to believe him when, after reading Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" before breakfast, I saw a great flock of the creatures, honking their way over the water. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.