BIRDSONG / ROADS

Two of my more entrenched preoccupations are coming together. We're getting to the time of year when birdsong really gets underway - at dusk and obviously at dawn. My brother recently referred to the dawn chorus a lot less poetically when he mentioned 'Lots of birds, whistling'.

But where I am now I can't hear anything except an endless procession of heavy lorries causing the windows to vibrate in their frames. If I'm awake at, say, 4.30, then I can just about hear, but there aren't many species living alongside a main road. This is a double whammy for me. At risk of sounding extremely melodramatic, a person's appreciation of birdsong on a wet spring evening is spoilt by traffic noise and that person was formerly bereaved by a road death.

Cars destroy the environment in many ways, just as their influence can erode people's quality of life so variously. Don't forget it. Roads are the undoing of the earth. Really and truly.

I got up at 4.00am over the Easter weekend and went for a stroll through the woods (no-one thinks it's too strange - I suppose they are used to me). A bit early in the year as most migrants haven't arrived yet, though I heard a cuckoo. I don't even recognise most of the calls/songs, but classification doesn't matter too much to me. The most important thing was to be in a place where I could hear a stream, 'lots of whistling birds', but NO CARS.

Back to roads, I have noticed that the Trafffic Police no longer use 'ACCIDENT' to bring a fatality to people's attention. Good. They are now putting out boards that say 'SERIOUS TRAFFIC COLLISION'. Which is a bit more like it. If someone is at the wheel while holding a mobile phone/drinking/speeding/jumping red lights/driving badly, and they happen to kill someone else while doing so, then that person's death is not truly an accident. It's the direct, preventable result of a high-risk activity. Interesting that when some kids died on a railway line about four years ago, having wandered away from a picnic, their parents were subsequently charged with manslaughter for failing to supervise them properly. Imagine if the same kids had wandered away from a picnic onto a road and been killed. There is not a chance that this would have been deemed manslaughter.

Please, don't comment about cyclists jumping red lights unless you are happy to get into a long, spirited, debate about it.

BASIC SKILLS

I've started teaching a student to read and write. We meet on two evenings a week. It's very tiring after a long day in the office - especially as I have to travel to and from his home - but the money is useful and it's quite rewarding. When adults are beginning to read and write you are not supposed to give them "Daddy is working in the garden"-style "Peter and Jane" books, so as not to alienate or patronise them. So I paid a visit to the local library for some suitable books. I was pleased to find a 'Basic Skills' section, although most of the material was too advanced for my student. I picked up half a dozen of the less wordy books and here's one (below). It's so spectacularly odd and peculiar I feel compelled to record it. The idea behind this series, apparently, is to 'explore some of the things that can happen when you can't read very well'. But what are the chances of this happening? Here's the book. A line signifies a new page:

When I was twenty-one I was working at the Manchester Clothing Company.
I came out of work because I had bad toothache.
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I went to the dentist on Stockport Road, near the Apollo Cinema.
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I rang the doorbell and a lady came to the door, wearing a black pinny.
I said, "Can I see the dentist?" She said, "Come in. Go in there."
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So I went in the room. It was full of people. I went white.
The dentist was in his coffin. He was laid out.
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The lady said. "You have gone white. I said, "I didn't know the dentist was dead."
She said ,"Didn't you read the notice on the door?"
I said, "I'm sorry I couldn't read it".
So I came out and went to another dentist on Hyde Road. He said, "Come in."
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He turned the wireless up a bit and said, "We will have a bit of music."
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The he pulledout four teeth. He nearly pulled my head off.
Then I knew why he had turned up the wireless.


That's it!!!!! The ending is too abrupt and the connection between turning the wireless up and tooth extraction isn't really explored or explained. Furthermore, the line breaks are all over the place and there were two full stops missing (I included them above). What a strange book.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Went back to the gym again today. I had to give it a rest for a while because of a mysterious 'hip injury'.... Anyway, every so often I looked up at a small plasma TV screen ahead of me. I didn't have headphones plugged in so couldn't hear the soundtrack. A trailer advertised a show called "Sixty Minute Makeover" which would appear after the next commercial break. The letters 'sixty minute makeover' appeared against a plain red background so there was no accompanying image to provide a context. It occurred to me that Reality TV has really come to something when the object of the exercise - the thing being 'made over' - could be any one of the following:

a person's appearance: (hairstyle, make-up, dress sense)
a person's diet and eating habits
a garden
spending habits/bank accounts
soft furnishing, furniture, colour schemes

I can't remember which it was.

Also, it is commonplace to have to remember various four-digit codes along with other assorted passwords. It's just a part of life now - not unusual or particularly onerous. Personally, I only have four sets of 4-digit numbers to remember. These accompany my switch card, visa card, electronic doors at work, and server room at work. I was a bit surprised last week, then, when I entered a lift cab and found myself punching a four digit code into the panel. It's just '4' for fourth floor! But this got me wondering whether there will ever be buildings with thousands of floors. I think not.

Speaking of lambs...

I watched two lambs emerging (literally) from their mothers last weekend. Front feet first closely followed by a little nose and face. Apparently, the sheep that haven't lambed before take a while to realise what's happening - they're a bit slow. Imagine, if you had the mental reckoning to be aware of it all - what a shock it would be then! Anyway, it's a very busy time for the shepherds/farmhands. I chatted to one of them on the midnight to 6am shift. He has to watch for cauls and make sure the mother sheep successfully frees the lambs from them to prevent suffocation. If the ewe is struggling he'll intervene. The lamb is up on its feet very quickly - albiet unsteadily with a tendency to fall onto its knees. When all goes well, about half an hour or so after lamb is born - the farmer picks up the lambs by their back legs and carries them away from the stalls. The mother sheep, obviously, is not best pleased by this and will follow instinctively (unless it's her first time when she may need a bit of a shove). Then the lambs are fed a few drops of some kind of medication from a gravity drip feeder and they have their umbilical cords sprayed with iodine to prevent infection, after which time ewe and lamb/s go into their own little private pen. Like a lying in hospital for sheep. A few days later they go off to the fields again to play. I asked the shepherd whether it really is play, or whether it just looks like play. He said that the lambs definitely enjoy themselves racing and chasing each other round. New lambs are the cutest. They are the same shape as tiny donkeys and they have a juvenile 'baaa' that sounds infantile. I held one. I could feel its ribs, and its strong heart was pounding through its warm, woolly little body.

Later the same day - miles away from conurbations/towns/streetlights, with no moon and no cloud cover - the most amazing display I think I've ever seen in this country. The sky was filled with a thousand stars! If there was a deckchair I would've sat and watched them like other people sit and watch tv. But I was being harassed to come inside and it was a freezing night. Anyway. Rural life - magic!

MARCH

It comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion.

TS Eliot - Preludes, Pt 1

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

I always think the success of this owes much to 'wraps' and 'beats' - one-syllable, present-simple verbs which make for a dull, insistent rhythmn. These words describe motion and it's important that they are at the end of a line, wending (or wrapping) their way into the next. Eliot presents a world teeming with motion but it's not the kind of action you can create, participate in or derive pleasure or meaning from. Stuff happens with no input from anyone. The 'gusty shower' (subejct) wraps newspapers and leaves (object) around 'your feet' (indirect object). Note, people are so unimportant they play second fiddle to leaves and are not even visible. Otherwise we would have 'A gusty shower wraps withered leaves about *you*'. I've always been a fan of TS Eliot (but not of The Wasteland).

This is a great poem. It's sensory and visual with great imagery. But a street scene devoid of people is a bit eerie and the whole thing smacks of desolation ('withered', 'grimy', 'vacant', 'broken', 'burnt out'). It's no surprise, with this as his output, that enviroment/atmosphere was such a bit deal for Eliot. He came up with the term 'objective correlative' in an essay on Hamlet which I will get around to writing about one day in another post. But, back to this poem - I feel sure he wrote it in London!