THE Lent Lilies, so glorious a couple of weeks ago, have by and large shrivelled back to apologetic brown and slimy stains at the side of every village green and township approach road the length and breadth of Tynedale.

We’ve had the lambing storm, we are several weeks into British Summer Time and lusty birds are doing what comes naturally on every rooftop and washing line in the land.

I’ve spotted my first shivering swallows and house martins, and the sand martins have started tunnelling away at the same piece of riverbank they have excavated for the past 40 years.

We are only weeks away from the annual debate as to whether that vigorous purple shoot is a bona fide plant, or a weed.

We are never really sure, because over the years we have acquired all manner of perennials from sources all over the area, and have no idea what any of them are supposed to look like.

I have cut the grass for the first time - always a traumatic experience since I messily masticated a four foot eel brought home and abandoned the previous autumn by my sons - and three quarter filled the brown garden waste wheelie bin with dead leaves, none of which appear to have emanated from our own single rowan tree.

Perhaps someone in the Canary Islands is wondering how their garden came to be full of debris from our mountain ash, because the odd-shaped and unfamiliar leaves which accumulate in our garden appear to have travelled many miles - I believe there may have even been a couple of Whomping Willow cast offs in there this year.

The fact is that no matter how diligently I hoover up every leaf from the Hextol Towers greensward, by the time I have put the lawnmower away, a thousand more have appeared in a frantic and swirling search for their former lawnmates.

All the evidence points to the fact that spring has finally sprung, even though the water in the birdbath froze the other day, and Max the Japanese Jalopy had to have his windscreen scraped before I could go to work.

Spring comes second only to summer in my personal seasonal popularity poll.but it does not seem to have the significance to the younger generation that it did when I was a boy.

This was brought home to me during a chat with my six-year-old granddaughter when she declared solemnly: “Granda, I have never, ever, in my entire life, seen a frog.”

“Do you want to kiss one?” I asked, but she shook her head vehemently, and said: “ Don’t be silly Granda - that’s just in fairy stories. I just wondered what they look like in real life!”

I was frankly amazed, because when I was little no child’s life was complete without the rite of passage that was collecting frogspawn, and growing your own frogs in a fish tank, goldfish bowl, or more usually a large jam jar.

“Have you never been out with your dad collecting frogspawn?” I asked incredulously, but I might as well have asked whether she had ridden to school on a unicorn that day.

When we were boys we collected frogspawn by the bucketload, had frogspawn fights and ladelled gallons of it down the necks of hysterical girls - reprehensible behaviour on so many levels, but it seemed damned good fun at the time.

And no matter how much we wasted in our blissful youthful ignorance of matters environmental, there was always more to be gleaned from the ponds, ditches and swampy places which abounded before “improved” methods of agriculture wiped out most of the breeding grounds for amphibious playmates.

Throughout the spring, a thousand homes in Macclesfield would have jars of frogspawn simmering gloopily away on a prominent shelf, but most children became bored long before the black eyes of the jelly-tapioca mix started to change shape before emerging as wriggling tadpoles.

Gallons would be flushed down the loo by frustrated parents as their offspring lost interest in the miracle of birth, and it was only a very few who saw the tadpoles grow gills, and finally absorb their tails to become fully fledged frogs.