A magnificent pair of tits, Neil Young, a blade of grass, and roasted asparagus with panch phoran
Abundance: Thursday 3 April 2025
I’m not sure if it was the recycling lorry and the clank of bottles and jars, the troublesome exhaust of the lad at number 45, the snoring dog, or the coal tit’s early call that hauled me from the deep well of sleep into the day; as the former fade, the dog and the tit erratically claw for air space, one seemingly at 4:4 time the other at 6:7.
The first uncertain moments of the day - where am I; who am I - are in no way helped by the lorry blaring ‘For What It’s Worth1’ as it moves on. It’s as if I’m waking in a movie, a Vietnam veteran, though last time I checked I wasn’t Martin Sheen2, and, regrettably, it still seems to be the case.
March has been much improved by a magnificent pair of tits.
As I tweaked, refined and polished - for the final time - the manuscript for Abundance, the book that came from these virtual pages, I watched the magnolia in a neighbour’s garden go from bare to bud to bloom, accompanied by the almost unbroken daytime song of two birds.
Out front, the coal tit; out back, a great tit. Both sound as if their song is the result of a child using their thumb over the nozzle of a bicycle pump to elicit a two tone squeak. It is a noise as scratched into the memory as the chorus of a song you shouldn’t like as a kid, something so entirely opposed to what you’re ears otherwise require as to be embarrassing. Even the thought of that bicycle pump squeak transports me to half terms where joyous boredom was a possibility, where a whole day might be lost to switching your bike’s handlebars from cow horns to ape hangers.
As I rub my eyes this morning, it occurs to me that the thing I regret most about the mobile phone is the absence of boredom, the lack of opportunity for the smallest, most mundane undertaking to fill the mind like a passenger air bag, and for its minuscule rewards, its tiny obstructions and sweet resolutions to be communed with fully, without resort to the world of possibilities the phone promises. On the plus side you have the ability to watch a match, live, happening on the other side of the world, while you hurtle through the nighttime countryside on a train; you can instantly resolve almost any lapse in brain function (‘who was it who played Captain Dobey? Ahhh, of course, Bernie Hamilton IV’); you can express your creativity instantly to an theoretically unlimited world of observers, while on the other side of the scales, when was the last time you saw a kid (or a grown up for that matter) lining a fat blade of grass between thumbs to create the most primitive of reeds through which to scrape the ear drums of those in your post code? And so too, bicycle pump screeches seem a thing of the past.
And so I am grateful for every two-tone call from the coal tit, whether first thing or last.
The great tit in the back garden is an irritating little bugger. He’s irritating because his song is so superficially similar to the coal tit - a little lower, a little less sweet, often longer in the phrase - and side by side you can tell them apart, but how often to they sit in the same bush? If I am lucky and stand on a certain slab, one song hits me from the front, the other from the back: it is not a little unsettling when two sounds arrive in that way, like the horror film soundtrack of imminent unpleasantness in the department store when the upbeat music from one concession meets the orchestral music from another3.
At this one location, midway between front and back garden, I can instantly tell them apart; any other time, despite considerable recourse to Merlin and my memory, I am at best 60% sure it is one or the other. Today, on an early spring day where a third load of washing dries on the line, plumcot4 blossom blasé about the chance of the frost, I see that great tit and I say hello.
As the manuscript left, in its place chiffchaffs have taken to the hedges and woodlands that drape the town. In a perfect world, all birds - no, everything - should be named after the noise they make.
A few days ago, this upbeat songster might well have been in Africa, needing little time to recover if its chirpiness is anything to go by. What a pleasure to listen to the song of a bird that’s travelled all this way, while I send these digital words in the opposite direction - out into the world (including to few hundred of you in Africa) from a few yards away from where he’s perched, singing.