The Shire

Day 12; Oxford-Shire

J R R Tolkein based his fictional Eden on his home in parts of Worcestershire that are now swallowed up by Birmingham - a distillation of the kind of nostalgic Englishness that he found reassuring. Middle-earth also borrowed bits from other parts of the English Midlands, including Oxford and its Shire. In their early teens, our children and their friends applied "The Shire" to the corner of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire where we have all lived since the 1990s. This carried more than a hint of self-conscious irony about the privilege and comfort of their lives, without devaluing it - or their parents who provided it - at all. How clever and astute

After so long away, in places radically unlike The Shire, there is great comfort in homecoming - to MrsM, our place, our space, our ways, of course - but also to familiar vistas, trees and plants that are old friends, reassuring smells and sounds

The brewery is our constant companion. It is good to see scaffolding erected around the site of the fire while I was away - like a friend whose injury is finally receiving treatment. I decided a picture of our outlook would be the best representation of this feeling of fitting back into place. The photo-bombing by the jackdaws was a lucky chance (see them arrayed along the apex of the tower roof), and a welcome one. I've come to regard them as our personal, local analogue of the ravens in the tower - while they are around, no ill fortune will afflict us. I'll take their dramatic appearance as a welcome home by The Shire