VIRUS-TIME SHORT TALKS No. 8: The Birds

No. 8 The Birds 

The daughter got us a book one Christmas – Ireland’s Garden Birds – and it's come into its own, in lockdown time. I still can’t tell my finches from my tits or my wagtails from my wrens. Except that wagtails are bigger. The wee wren is nothing more than a mouth, a feathery voice-box, wherein the call is bigger than the bird. (sfx – wren).

The gardens in our estate back onto each other and there's plenty of space to fly in. The planes at the airport recognise this. They fly over any time they’re working. Generally, our estate’s fly-zone is strictly for the birds, birds I can name and many more I can't. 

There was even a kestrel here a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, it’s quite religious. It’s said to nest in the nearby Cathedral. This one came in over the Fire Station, hovered ominously, then dive-bombed a wee mouse, which it had for lunch. (sfx – kestrel) 

I was reminded of Barry Hines’ great book, Kestrel for a Knave and Ken Loach’s brilliant film Kes, about a wee boy training a kestrel. The kestrel out our back didn’t look like it wanted to be trained. 

All the other birds, especially the wee ones, made themselves scarce when Kes was about. I had the daughter’s book open, looking up kestrels, when they started to return. 

A tiny ball of fluff with a pert sticky-up tail landed and I guessed it was a wren. Yep, there it is, in full colour, on page 92 in the book, cocking and twerking it’s tail, while it sings. 

There’s a pair of robins, of course. They nest behind the broken vent-cover on next door’s wall. They’ve been flat out nest-building and then feeding their young. It struck me that they know little and care less about my lockdown ramblings.

Magpies get a bad press. I know the rhyme ‘one for sorrow’, but I like magpies. Apparently magpies can remember human faces and make friends with people. In fact, some of my closest friends are magpies. (sfx – magpie). 

Birds don’t make friends with cats, who stalk them like tigers. So, a warning to all my tweet-tweet friends, including magpies, remember what they used to say in Hills Street Blues, hey, be careful out there.

But my BFF, my best feathered friend, is the blackbird. (sfx – blackbird).

Francis Ledwidge, the poet-soldier on leave in Ebrington Barracks in 1916, wrote about blackbirds and people, silenced by war

But in the lonely hush of eve

Weeping I grieve the silent bills.’

I heard the Poor Old Woman say

In Derry of the little hills.’

But still, the blackbird sings up and down our street. I’m glad there’s no silent bills, but plenty of bird song. (sfx – lark) Is that a lark, in the clear air? (sfx – tune: lark in the clear air- violin)

Broadcast on BBC Foyle, The Breakfast Show, 25.5.2020 

Available on BBC Sounds. From 1 55 00

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000jfv6

VIRUS-TIME SHORT TALKS No. 7: Star Gazing

No. 7 Star gazing 

I’ve been watching Venus, the evening star, since this lock-down started. I’ve seen clear night skies, featuring a jewel, beaming and twinkling, set on a turquoise cloth. Venus is descending now, over the neighbours’ houses. If she keeps going, she’ll end up in the carpark at the back of the doctor’s surgery, at the top of the street.

I’ve never done much gazing at the stars, except for occasionally looking up and going ooooh! I wouldn’t know me plough from me pole. But I do like them. They remind me not to get too full of myself, telling me there’s more going on in the universe than my goings-on, though those are critical to me. Obviously.

Turns out the evening star, Venus, is not a star at all. It’s a planet. Like earth, only more sparkly. Who gets to name the planets and the stars? And where do they get the names? 

Venus was the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility. Ancient pictures show a beautiful young woman with hardly a dollion on her. How she didn’t get a cold in her kidneys, I’ll never know. 

Then there’s Adonis, the Greek god of beauty, desire and vegetation. Another handsome youngster with hardly a stitch on him. If I gaze at the stars long enough, will I see an Adonis up there? Or a Dave? Planet Dave? Naw.

I doubt we’ll see many Venus’ and Adonis’ on the local beaches this summer. We’ll be at Step one hundred and fourteen before we get to that. Maybe next year. 

So, I’m going to make a mask out of my mankini. There’s a video doing the rounds of a woman making a mask out of a sock. There’s no way I’m putting a sock of mine across my face. As the mankini will not see service this year, I’ll give it a good soak in bleach and modify the sock-mask instructions.

The best night’s star-gazing I ever had was on the thirty first of December, 1979. Years ago. I was no Adonis, you can be sure, but a hardy boy, with milk-bottle white skin and a ruddy face over a ruddy beard, doing voluntary service in West Africa. Me and a yank, called Doug – had to be – hiked and camped from the town of Basse to the town of Fatoto, beside the The Gambia river. We camped on a bluff above the small town of Garawoll on that New Year’s Eve night and we pinned a bottle of Drambuie. It was hogmanay without Jools Holland. 

We gazed at the stars, countably infinite, above us. Though I wouldn’t have liked to be counting them. The town below us settled for the night, cooking fires and oil lamps went out. Silence descended, a silence that predated time. At first, me and Doug talked serious, but as the wee dram went down, we got giggly and more entertaining. I don’t remember a word of it. But I do remember the stars. 

Now I mainly do my star-gazing at the pictures and on the telly. Tom Cruise in Rain Man. Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle. Juliette Binoche in Three Colours: Blue. Don Cheadle in anything. Crash. Traitor. 

Mathew McConaughey is in The Lincoln Lawyer, on the box. That’s tonight’s star-gazing sorted.

Broadcast on BBC Foyle, The Breakfast Show, 18.5.2020 

Available on BBC Sounds
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000j9r9

VIRUS-TIME SHORT TALKS No. 6: Blossom

There’s a cherry tree at the end of our street. It’s just finished shedding its blossom, from branches that hang down like Rapunzel's tresses, cascading out of the tower where she was in forced - not self - isolation. 

Great long tresses she had, which would be no good to her now, as she’d never get a haircut in this town and she’d be better off keeping well socially-distanced from any wannabe princes or other latchicos who might come carousing with their 

Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your hair. 

Like in the fairy-tale. 

We’re in the middle of a fairy-tale ourselves. Locked up in our – well – towers, with our hair growing out all over the place and nothing to put manners on it only the trusty electric shears that would be better suited to clipping a mountain ewe. 

We’d love to be at the end of it, because to live in the middle of a fairytale is to live in suspense and uncertainty, where every day is a bad hair day. Even for a baldy like me.

My wee electric clipper makes a hornet’s drone of a noise, just as the sounds of summer gear up, around our estate: electric hedge-clippers that sound like steel false teeth rattling in a jar; electric and petrol mowers – you get a couple of them going in tandem and it’s the sound track of the World War 2 film The Battle of the Bulge. Then there’s strimmers, voracious whirligigs that make a swarm of locusts sound like a silent picture. 

And of course the power hoses underscore all the others with roars last heard in that Inferno your man Dante wrote about. No fairy-tale that.

There’s even the odd chainsaw. A lumberjack neighbour brought round his chainsaw and cut down our cherry tree, a while back. I miss it – the tree, not the chainsaw - and seeing the blossom up the street reminded me of it. I’d like another one, not just for ‘keeping up with the Jones’. The people at the end of our block are not called Jones anyway. If that’s what you heard, that’s fake news, which actually started with a story of a cherry tree. Least in the USA, it did. 

George Washington, landowner in the British Colony of Virginia, general, rebel, politician and slave owner, cut down a cherry tree, not with a chainsaw, but with a hatchet. He was only a lad when he did it, so I’m guessing it was a small one. No matter. His da was fuming and tackled him. “Did you cut down my favourite cherry tree, son?” Young George replied “I cannot tell a lie.” 

His father thought his son’s honesty was worth more than a thousand trees and he didn’t chastise the boy. Probably rewarded him with a horse or land or more slaves. It’s a story about the virtue of honesty in the young George Washington, a future US President. Turns out it’s fake news; false; a myth; untrue; a fairytale. In my game, it’s called fiction. Like, saying that drinking cleaning products might be good for your health.

I’m glad the neighbours have a cherry tree. I look forward to seeing the blossom again next spring. When we might be out of our self-isolating towers, back onto the street and meeting up on our way to the hairdressers. I’d love a bob.

Broadcast on BBC Foyle, The Breakfast Show, 11.5.2020  Available on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000j1bc

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VIRUS-TIME SHORT TALKS No. 5: MUGS

No. 5 Mugs 

I’m not saying my perceptions have sharpened since this lockdown started – at my age, they just get more and more rose-tinted – but I have been seeing small things more keenly recently. Ordinary things. 

Like, I don’t know about your house, but our house is coming down with mugs. I don’t mean the people. Certainly not my designated lockdown companion, not one bit of a mug there. No, I mean the things you drink out of. Flat at the bottom, roundy, cylindrical sides, then open at the top. And only one ear. 

Like Van Gogh. (GOF). Aye, Vincent. (sings) Starry, starry night, paint your palette blue and grey. That’s him. Vincent Van Gogh. The artist. He was great with yellow as well. Sunflowers. Magic. Now Van Gogh had only one ear. One handle, you could say. Or if you prefer, only one lug-hole.

It’s said that he took a blade to his mate Paul Gauguin, another painter, when they lived together in Arles, in the South of France, a dispute over turpentine or something and when Gauguin got off-side, Vincent de-lugged himself. Cleaved a slice of the right head-handle off.

Or so they say. Might be fake news. There’s plenty of it about. 

(Sing) Morning fields of amber grain.

So that’s why I thought of Vincent van Gogh when I was looking at all the mugs in the house. The things you see in lockdown, eh? 

My best mug is 20 years old. I know that because the lad brought it back from the jersey shore when he went on a swimming camp there. It’s branded Ron Jon’s Surf Shop and when you read the logo, the handle is in the left ear position, just like Van Gogh’s good lug. I know, you could turn it round, but then you’d be looking at the back of Van Gogh’s head. As it were.

I’m seeing this all anew, in virus-time. Like the wheelie bins lined up the street, every Wednesday, after an out rider from the refuse collection posse gets them into position for the wagon coming round later. They look statuesque and inscrutable, especially the ones coloured Van Gogh blue. 

They make me think of the statues of heads on Easter Island, in the South Pacific, huge stone statues over five hundred years old. Many of them are shy an ear or two. The people who built them weren’t mugs, I can tell you.

I know. A mug is a small thing. I just think small things are important, especially now. Small things can be precious. Looking closely at them can open up big stories. As the great Indian novelist, Arundhati Roy wrote, in her Booker-Prize winning novel, The God of Small Things.

The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. You know what? It must be time to get comfortable and read that book again. Kettle on. Muggatay. (sings) Starry, starry night, paint your palette (fade)  Broadcast on BBC Foyle, The Breakfast Show, 4.5.2020  Available on BBC Sounds

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