Away with the Birds

 Regular readers of these missives will know that I don’t have a great fondness for animals. I like eating them of course and I’ve sometimes taken pleasure in watching them race each other. But caring for them as living sentient beings has always been beyond me. If truth be told, as I progress into grumpy middle age, I find that I’m not even fond of most humans.

So, the events of the last month have taken me by surprise. It started on a balmy Saturday night. Spring had uttered a chesty cough and finally woke after a long slumber. We’ve had the wettest winter in Auckland since records started, so when the sun finally returned, we broke out the deck chairs and encamped onto our deck.   

As I relaxed with a refreshing APA in hand, I noticed something on the back wall of our house. There, on a light fitting about three metres from the floor was a bird’s nest. It seemed to me that it had been constructed that day, but if truth be told, they might have been at it for months. It was an intricate design of interwoven twigs that seemed to conform to all the relevant building codes within the bird world.

The only thing it was missing was a resident. We wondered if it had been built and then abandoned after the birds realised how many cats live in our neighbourhood. But the next day, we heard some cheeping and found a fat, female blackbird perched majestically on top. I should point out that I know as much about ornithology as I do about nuclear physics.  My wife was the one who made the identification, including the important fact that female blackbirds are not actually black. They are brown.

She was wrong on one important matter though. She reckoned we were watching solo parenting. That blackbirds were like bawdy sailors, arriving into a different town each week, knocking up the ladies and then high-tailing it (if you’ll excuse the pun) whenever an egg appeared.

Some loud chirping the next day disproved this theory. Daddy blackbird (who is indeed black) had made a grand entrance and wanted to let everyone in the neighbourhood know of his arrival. It became clear that his visits were to allow his partner to temporarily leave the nest and seek out food. When this happened, he rarely came to the twiggy home itself. He would perch on a fence nearby, keeping a wary eye on the neighbourhood cats and presumably letting the other birds know to stay away. Once Mammy had returned with a full belly, he would leave without so much as a farewell cheep.

Things changed when the kids arrived. We noticed a couple of tiny, nervous beaks peeking out of the nest, arching their necks whenever Mam came back with food. At this point, Dad became a bit more hands-on. He stays with the nest now when Mam is out feeding and often arrives with a couple of tasty worms that he shares with the family.

What surprises me most is how interested I am in all this. Our neighbour’s cat came for a visit and I found him climbing on our garden furniture and making a beeline for the nest. I immediately grabbed a broom and raced outside with murderous intent. The cat got the message and high-tailed it back home. I then rearranged the furniture to make access more difficult.

My wife and I now regularly check on the birds. She has started leaving out food for them which they studiously ignore. These are strong, independent hunters, well able to feed themselves from the bounty in our garden. My daughter is less enamoured. She is a cat lover and hates the way we portray them as potential chick killers. This has caused a rift in the house based on which side of nature you want to prevail. Cats are not native to New Zealand and they kill millions of local birds each year. Most native New Zealand birds evolved to be ground dwellers and never expected a moggy to arrive on a boat from England and trap them in their greedy paws.

My daughter, who is far too smart for her age, has pointed out that blackbirds are also not native. Somebody in the 19^th century thought it would be a great wheeze to bring all sorts of fauna to New Zealand. Why they wanted to bring blackbirds is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they snuck onto one of the early ships.

I don’t know the long journey their ancestors took, but I’m glad that this couple of birds made it to my deck. It’s wonderful to watch them interact, take care of their offspring and to bring new life into our lives. I should also acknowledge that as pets go, they are very low maintenance. They don’t need feeding or watering, don’t leave hairs all over furniture and you don’t have to carry a small plastic bag to pick up their pooh.

But of course, they are not pets. They carry on as though we don’t exist. Somehow, they know we are not a threat and that the cats are. We just happen to be the people who live in the house they have chosen to stay at this year. When the chicks are old enough, they’ll fly the coop and the parents will move on to their summer homes. If they survive the cat apocalypse, there is every chance they’ll be back next spring to start the process off again.

And so the wheel of life keeps turning. My job now is to see those chicks off into the new life. I’ll keep shoeing the cat away and keep an eye out for that first nervous step out of the nest. Apparently, this is a high-risk time. If that first flutter of wings doesn’t work, then they’ll fall three metres to their death. I can’t even contemplate that thought. But I’ll keep you updated. 

London in the Rare Old Times

 Like many things from my early years, Dan Air no longer exists. It was sold for a pound in 1992 to British Airways and disappeared from the public imagination.

In the eighties, however, it represented an early incarnation of budget travel, albeit with a whiff of danger thrown in. Eleven crashes in the previous twenty years had earned it the nickname “Dan Dare”. This included an incident when a plane landed at the wrong airfield when approaching Belfast Aldergrove airport.

That was where I boarded a Dan Air flight for the first and only time. I paid the princely sum of 39 pounds for a one way flight to Gatwick in February 1988. I was leaving my hometown of Dundalk for the bright lights of London. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I would end up spending 22 of the next 34 years abroad.

London became my home for five years. It would have been longer but my girlfriend at the time had itchy feet and wanted to move abroad. A year later, I discovered that her itchy feet weren’t confined to where she lived.  

But London still holds a special spot in my heart. I lived there during the formative years of my mid-twenties when the world was a sun-drenched garden waiting to be explored. I was innocent and curious. Full of energy and ready to throw myself into everything that the metropolis had to offer.

Ireland in 1988 was a mono-cultural wasteland in permanent recession. In that year, ninety thousand other young people made the same decision as me and got out. Many went to New York or Boston, some to the regional cities of Britain. But most, like me, went to London. There are probably only five other cities in the world that could compare for opportunity and excitement and for us, London was only an hour away on a rickety Dan Air de Havilland Comet.

I had first visited London as a ten-year-old and remember being amazed by the colours, smells and sounds. It was as though I lived in a damp caravan with a black and white TV while a drug-fuelled disco raved nearby. I came back as a nineteen-year-old for my brother’s 21^st. I remember walking around Soho and Covent Garden and being mesmerized by the anonymity and freedom that London allowed. I can’t remember when I choose to move there, but I’m sure the seed was sown that weekend.

I arrived on a Tuesday, played my first ever organised game of adult football on the Saturday and then had my first ever Indian Curry (a Chicken Korma, which at the time was the spiciest thing I’d eaten).  I had my choice of jobs and picked the one with the best canteen, as cooking wasn’t a skill I had brought from the old country.

Ireland has a complex relationship with its nearest neighbour. Eight hundred years of invasion, rape and pillage will do that to a friendship. We like to see them lose in sport and even the Eurovision Song Contest and we get indignant if they claim one of our sport stars or writers as their own. But we follow their club football teams, love their music and watch their TV. We are also obsessed with their culture and history. I’d wager that a higher percentage of Irish people could name Henry 8^th’s wives or the top British generals of World War Two than could their Anglo counterparts.

I loved every minute of those five years and I have visited London many times since. But I’m glad I don’t live there now.

It’s with a feeling of sadness that I look at what Britain and particularly England has become. In hindsight, the signs were there in 1988. Thatcher was in her ninth year of power. She had gutted the mining and manufacturing industries in the North and promoted a Financial Services industry in the South. As a result, London boomed and I surfed that wave like a kid in a sweet shop. I did well out of Thatcher’s policies and earned enough to keep me in beer and curries, with plenty left over for travel and nice cars.

I was too self-indulgent to realise that while we were partying down south, the rest of England was in terminal decline. I saw it occasionally. My Mother visited once. We took her to Chinatown to show off the fantastic food options. She came out with a memorable line when we’d finished our meal of noodles and dumplings. She asked my friend if he liked it ‘or would he prefer his dinner’.  

 She asked me to drive her to Leeds later that week, so she could visit her sister. As we left the outskirts of London, we drove under a bridge where somebody had painted “It’s Hell up North”. They weren’t wrong. I also visited a company outside Manchester for work and was left with the impression that my hometown in Ireland was more cultured and eclectic.

Those decisions by Thatcher have now caught up with the English. The population outside London are now revolting. The Tories bought them off for a few years by blaming everything on foreigners and immigrants. But that lie is now been exposed.

England is now at a crossroads. History tells us that when steam has left the kettle, it is not possible to force it back in. All you can do is direct the course of travel. It could go left, as peasant revolts have done in the past. The labour movement could harness it and drive towards a socialist revolution.

Or it could go right. And unfortunately, that looks like where it is headed. Towards populism, fascism and violence toward anyone who doesn’t belong to the narrow band of heterosexual Englishness.   

This makes me incredibly sad. A country I admire greatly has gone to the dogs and worse still, they might win the World Cup and next year’s Eurovision Song Contest.