It's always darkest before the dawn

After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat

- John Lewis-Stempel

‘When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, we admired the island and wandered all over it’ From the ‘Odyssey’, Homer, 750BC–650BC

HOMER, of course. The Odyssey. Few, if any, stand before me in my admiration of the Ancient Greek poet, not only for the epic verse, but the devotion to small-scale agriculture. It’s there in the Iliad and the Odyssey, if you read them closely. Homeric heroes reckoned their riches in cattle and pigs rather than glittering gold. Better still, they farmed the family plot themselves. Odysseus was as skilled with ploughshare as with sword.

Yet, personifying the sunrise as dawn, soothing the day into being? Perhaps in the Ithaca of old. I vouchsafe that I, a yeoman farmer, have seen more break of days in Britain than most and sun emergent on the horizon, pinkly benevolent, is, frankly, a minor act. Our native dawn comes in so many more forms. It comes seeping over the horizon like spilt milk or bloodshed. There are days when the sun ascends by mere right, insouciant, majestic, so Charles II. The times it powers up over the eastern horizon, nuclear, more portent of Armageddon than promise of Creation. Dawn it was, after all, that killed Romeo and Juliet. And, God, those days when you realise dawn is an illusion. Dawn does not rise, the Earth tilts down.