Living in Oxford makes you marvel at nature. There’s so much to check out. Even in the frustration and jams of rush hour traffic, the sight of a red-capped green woodpecker enthusiastically pulling out worms from a verge on the ring road, oblivious to traffic, is a heartening glimpse of the natural world all around us.

Similarly, the horses on Port Meadow surprise and startle when they suddenly raise their heads as one, and begin to move towards you, sending you scampering for the nearest bridge or gate.

While in Scotland this week, I stayed in a cottage. It was an old steading which had once contained a piggery, stables and a dairy – with nothing to see at night but a sky full of stars, and in the morning, a cloudscape to attract Mr Turner; well, it was magnificent.

I used to tell the seasons by the long-defunct Summertown Nursery, with its seasonal produce.

This half term I had the magnificent beech woods of Fife to calibrate the days, and on the West Sands at St Andrew’s (seen in Chariots of Fire), and Tentsmuir Point’s tides to roll back and forth across the gleaming miles of beach.

Picking up razor shells, cockles and barnacle-encrusted mussels, I piled them high on my arm. There were glistening jellyfish and an eye-less flounder washed up by an incoming tide, while oystercatchers strutted and wheeled just above the curling waves and curlews called overhead from the salt marsh and marram grass beyond.

“You’ve got to be there at four o’clock,” one of my children said. “That’s when the starfish arrive. I found masses the other day. That’s when you’ll see them too.”

If only nature was so predictable. That’s the joy of it – it’s not. There were hides for the patient and guidebooks for the curious, but nothing is so intensely pleasurable as discovering something afresh. Nature can surprise you.

Homing into the kitchen for a first cup of coffee as the early morning sun broke through the gusts of white cumulus cloud, I heard a shriek. It was coming from the downstairs bathroom.

Opening the door, the bath was full of bubbles.

“Look, look... there! It’s staring right at me.”

I turned. Peering through the window was a horse, its dark, kind eyes fixed on the bath, looking in with a curious intensity.

Then there were two. Then three.

“Oh, they’ve been at every window. I saw one looking in, in the middle of the night, and I didn’t even realise we had horses here,” my son said.

“It’s different in the country. All we get in Edinburgh is taxis rattling over the cobbles. You get used to those, though.”

Oxford’s parks and open spaces can deliver wildlife too. Just not at four o’clock precisely.

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