Here’s the text for the 7 May 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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A bit of gossip for you. There’s a couple in our neighborhood that everybody’s been talking about lately.

A pair of swans in the local pond.

Last year, very sadly, they lost all their children to avian flu. So this year we’ve really been rooting for them.

In March they built their nest under a little bridge. And eventually there was one perfect egg – but the next day it was gone, stolen perhaps by a fox. But the next day there was another egg – and from then on, Mama Swan hunkered down and never left her nest.

Cycling to work, I’d stop to greet her, or out for a jog. Others did, too: kids on the way to school, tourists, locals. Eventually the council had to put up barriers to give her some peace from her fans.

Last Wednesday evening, I noticed her posture had changed: her wings spread out like feathery canopies. I wondered, I waited, and when she shuffled, I saw them: four babies, another one pecking through, and four still-unhatched eggs.

“Oh, my goodness!” I said outloud. Someone stopped, I pointed, and soon a clutch of us were there on the bridge, lost in wonder. And doing something English strangers don’t usually do: talking with each other.

One woman – we realised we lived on the same street. “Hey, we’re neighbors!” she said. A teenager stopped, temporarily transfixed. A security guard came over with tears in his eyes.

The next morning, they were all there: nine babies and two proud parents. I told my fellow swan-fan-onlookers something I’d learned from Sir David Attenborough: Swans lay eggs on different days, but the baby cygnets coordinate through their eggshell barriers to hatch together on the same day.

“Wow!” said a woman on her phone. “My mum in Swansea says to tell that swan, she’s a star!”

In the Bible, Jesus says: How often I’ve wanted to gather you like a mother hen gathers her children under her wings.

We live in a vulnerable and fragile world – and the danger we face is real. Foxes need to raise their babies, too. It’s nature. And sadly, we’re never short of human tyrants who unnaturally thrive on violence and domination.

According to Jesus, God is not a tyrant, but a mother swan – who doesn’t guarantee us safety but definitely promises us love. God who, I believe, gathers cygnets and humans under her wings, reminding us that we’re not strangers, but neighbours. That we belong not only to God but to each other, and all creation.

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