House martins on telegraph wires. Resting awhile, then rising and joining forces, with a flock appearing out of nowhere. They’re darting and swooping and sharp-turning in pursuit of insects we can’t see, on a humid and cloudy late August day. She’s seen nothing like it, a lady who has known our patch for ninety years tells us. But we’re talking about house martins. Their numbers are radically reduced. Why now, we wonder. And it is something of a wonder, just watching them.

Over in Russia a plane has fallen out of the sky and Wagner leader Prigozhin was on the passenger list. (His death is now confirmed.) He was a flawed man, Putin tells us. Just one man. Or ten with the crew. Life is cheap.

The contrast plays on my mind. The one so stark a contrast with the other. The house martins we think are heading south, ahead of colder early-autumn weather we know is on its way. Next month or October, they’re off to Africa. Over the Sahel, where Prigozhin’s Wagner Group are in league with the rulers of Mali and the Central African Republic, and stirring crises in Sudan and Niger.

We know swallows head for South Africa, and house martins head south of the Sahel, though there’s some uncertainty as to quite where they winter.

It is South Africa where the five nations of the BRICS are meeting. With the economic heft of China and India and Brazil, and the drag weight of Russia, and the aspirations of South Africa itself, they are looking to chart the way to an alternative economic order. Reducing the power of the dollar (‘de-dollarisation’), and of the financial institutions developed in the post-war world which work, by their nature, in the West’s interests. That is the perception, and as we Western nations have been slow to realise, the reality.

And as of this weekend, applications to joint from Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Argentina and Ethiopia have been approved. Statements of intent. Countries either side of the Red Sea, and Ethiopia a short hop to the south, and Argentina the outlier. Whether or not a country operates as a democracy is an entirely secondary consideration.

The focus will move on from South Africa. And for a time it may from the BRICS. Maybe it is all aspiration, and with the Chinese economy stuttering, and the dollar on an upswing, the balance of economic power will remain broadly as it is.

In the meantime the house martins and swallows (and swifts as well) will follow their time-honoured routes, and if we don’t destroy their climate, and ours, which we might yet do, will continue to do so long after we are all gone.