There is an enormous fig tree in the back garden at my father's house in Hertfordshire. By the end of summer it is laden with figs which have always been too green and hard to eat. Until now.
 This year it has produced a crop that's ripe and ready to be plucked. Actually birds are doing most of the plucking but that's no bad thing. For example, a gaggle of five or six Thrushes regularly descends on the tree to peck furiously at the fleshiest figs they can find.
 Thrushes were one of the commonest birds in this garden when I was a child but they seem to have been few and far between in recent times. Happy to seem them tucking in.