first light, dawn, sunrise, daybreak

"The flotsam of the nation is washed together into an unrecognised, nameless, formless secret society. There isn't much that the bits of scum can do to help one another, but at least they can cling and keep silence. And dawn, I think, is the hour when the pariah goes out. Not for him is the scornful morning with its crowds pointing the fingers of their minds at him, nor the evening when all but he may rest and be merry; but the peace before sunrise cannot be taken from him. It is the hour of the outlawed, the persecuted, the damned, for no man was ever born who could not feel some shade of hope if he were in open country with the sun about to rise."

Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male (1939)

Nature notes - January dawn

Here, where I live, the dawn air is suffused with the delicate yet distinctly, sweetly acrid scent of slurry from the silage-fed, indoor-housed, milk-laden cows; it is filled with the low insistent hum of the milking machines and the repeated clonk-clunk-clonk of the yard scraper, as the amber fingers of the sodium lights break gently over the asbestos rooves of the industrial cattle barns, and the mist hangs low over the gently murmuring, phosphate-laden, fish-denying streams.

Elsewhere confident farmers deliver for society or ask, can we really carry on with farming as it is?