When a writer complains about being overworked, it’s always in the spirit of someone complaining about the inconveniences your suffer from people falling in love with you all the time. So best keep quiet: besides, next week they’ll have decided that someone else is far sexier.

But it has been a rather hectic few days, staring far too hard at the screen. Occasional phone calls offered the chance to look out of the window and across the marsh. I’ve been remiss: the vegetation has grown up in front of the dike and I can no longer see the water.

And that made it all the more dramatic. I was gazing rather vacantly in the middle of a phone-call about Olympic ping-pong when the bluest thing in the world materialised above the acid-green of the plants.

You normally see a kingfisher as a fizzing streak, low to the water. Here, for about a second and half, was a kingfisher hovering in the manner of a hummingbird, showing me first the blue of his black, then the rich pink of his front, a last blinding flash of blue – and then instant vanishment.

“So the backhand carries a higher risk than the forehand, but is more devastating when it comes off, yes?”

“That’s right, but for me…”

Kingfisher. Devastating.