With local elections done and dusted, a new cricket season springing into its stride and blossoms showering down like confetti at a country wedding, it takes a first-class cynic to find much fault with Norfolk right now.

Okay, there’s always a chance of spotting some emerging gourmet creeping up behind a frisky little lamb to shout “mint sauce!” before disappearing into a nearby thicket or five-star restaurant.

Yes, a small risk remains that in mowing the front lawn it may be necessary to break continuity of the stripes to go round the snowman built the day before by excited grandchildren.

All right, as the sap rises, an advertisement in the Little Troshing Advertiser could well read: “Young farmer with fertile 100 acres would be delighted to hear from young lady with tractor; please send photograph of tractor”.

I grant there might be the odd miscreant suggesting summer is the time when it’s too hot to do the job it was too cold to do in winter.

In the main, however, we smile and appreciate even when rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. We give thanks for bad jokes we haven’t heard before about the weather... “Why did Humpty Dumpty have a great fall? He wanted to make up for a lousy summer”.

I need a drop of fresh air after that, ruminating and reflecting ahead of more reading and writing. It’s a comfort to note how the most prolific and talented of our chroniclers seek regular outside inspiration.

I’m savouring Village Hours by Ronald Blythe, a lyrical record of a writer’s year set against the Stour Valley landscape he knew and loved so well. He greeted subtle changes that marked passing of the seasons and stirrings to outdoor pleasures or indoor comforts that these evoked.

“May is an enticing time and I can hardly bear to be inside” he admitted with no hint of guilt in following mating birds, belated bluebells, sniffing badgers and fresh rhubarb. He saluted “a John Constable morning. Cumulus clouds heap up on each other, then break to allow the blue to appear in a vast restlessness”.

I leave the book to go in search of a Henry Blogg evening, urging lilac bushes into full scent and traffic’s drone into an unseen lay-by. How many times did “one of the bravest men whoever lived” stand on Cromer Pier, watch the sun kiss the horizon and wonder if supper and sleep would pass untroubled?

A timely reminder of nature’s power to buffet as well as to soothe, of our neighbours’ ability to antagonise as well as to comfort and share good-hearted gossip. A man and dog cross my seafront path. One makes a mess. The other ignores it. Both go skulking into the twilight. I take my anger home and seek solace in Blythe’s Maytime spirit:

“The  farmers who toiled here century after century would have been too dog-tired at end of the day to enjoy a bit of depression. They would have nodded off on the porch-seat in the failing light, the collie’s head warm on their knee. The May-trees  would be blinding white in the meadow. Just as they are today”.

That makes me feel more kindly towards dogs and remember how Blogg seemed to treat his pet with far less reticence than he showed towards human who wanted to talk about his lifeboat experiences.

May evenings gradually blossom into useful extensions for days devoted largely to indoor challenges. Clearing a path to my study desk is a major battle after a long winter and spring extension of rifling through piles of books and magazines. Beating a retreat to the clifftop sanctuary after tea offers a valuable chance to take stock and resolve to do better.

I used to make lists of jobs waiting for attention but they got lost in the domestic debris. Now I go out to clear my head, smell the flowers listen to the birds, talk quietly to myself and return home brimming with fresh determination.

Trouble is that’s a perfect recipe for a little nap while pretending not to be waiting for the  weather forecast at end of a news bulletin. I bet Henry Blogg stayed fully alert when his wireless crackled with threats of wind, rain and heaving waves.

Just enough time before bed to sneak a look at Ronald Blythe’s June jottings. He crammed so much into every minute, turning slight observations and far-reaching thoughts into next page of yet another inspiring chapter:

“Having put the study to rights and listening to a friend on the telephone assuring me the end is nigh – the drought - I take a Barbara Pym into the garden. It’s the novel about gentlewomen in London flats just after the war; youngish friends, who run up curtains, worship in semi-bombed churches, arrange a few pieces of good furniture from the county vicarage. And wait for the boys to come home”.

How much that says in so tight a space. A true model for any who would aspire to think deeply, write concisely and organise properly.