and yet, it is august

It starts as a general feeling of gloom as I open my eyes and wack the alarm clock on snooze. It is grey and sticky outside, I know it even though the blinds are closed. The clouds are closing in.



And that is what happens later in the day, without fail. A few drops, a tactful warning that in a short moment the skies will open, so please return to your seats and enjoy the show. It's like someone turning the shower on, unlike rain that you usually get in this city. True downpour, banging on the roof of the office so heavily I wait for it to cave in. For a few minutes hardly anything can be seen from the window save for the grey mist of massive raindrops crashing against the building. And in a few minutes it's over. My Pakistani friends grin and say it's just like a monsoon, and makes them feel at home. My Canadian friend walks in, umbrella dripping, non-plussed. I think of cycling back in the monsoon, and sigh.

being an adult

It was not looking very happy, but it was well camouflaged; in fact I did not notice it at all until it was pointed out to me. Oh. A chick. Grey, rather large, rather ugly. Not very happy, but seemingly completely unbothered by our presence; I got within centimetres of it to take a picture and it didn't even budge. The RSPCA told me later that it did that most likely believeing itself to be invisible, meaning that it was safer for it to pretend to be a stone than to run away. Probably right.



Unhappy big grey wild bird chick in a ditch. We could not decide what species it was - a heron seemed possible, pointy beak and all, but what would a heron chick be doing in a awatery ditch on the side of a sleepy Totley lane? Apart from looking unhappy that is. We hovered, undeciced. Do we take it home? Do we leave it here? Do we call someone? To think that just a few years back there wouldn't have been an argument - a shoe-box would have been found and we would have taken it home of course, we can't leave it out here, it's cold and lonely! Now we hovered and discussed. My friend said: this is such a city-people approach. In nature things die and are born all the time, my aunt would have said, so stop making a fuss, she would have said. Well yes, there is that, I suppose. And being a resposible adult, thick skinned and unaffected by the small (imagined?) sufferings of the world. We should walk away, it's parent will come and get it. probably. Or something will come and get it anyway, and eat it, I think to myself, remembering the time when I tried to rear a chick which fell out of its nest in the garden; we were doing well, feeding it tadpoles, but one morning I turned up to the spot where I constructed it a surrogate nest, on the ground, and its head was missing. Well, probably it was not as dramatic as that, probably the bird was just not there, perhaps there was a blood-splattered feather or two, but this is how my immagination made me remeber it - a half-eaten chick in a surrogate nest. Oh well. We are adults now. These things happen. Keep walking.

I did call the RSPCA from home, but they very politely said there is nothing they can do, and that walking away was probably the best thing we could have done. Made me feel mature and reasonable for a moment, and then just a bit guilty - not so much to the bird, but to my younger self.

At least we found out what it was - a woodpigeon chick. And that does make me feel better. Because it's one thing to leave a heron chick, of which there are not that many (to my knowledge) around, another to leave a woodpigeon, which are not an endangered species in any way.

(The younger self scowls and shrugs, and goes back to playing with tadpoles.)

sunny afternoon

I have always wanted to have a room in the attic as a child, instead of the big-windowed, spacious room overlooking the street I had, with its harsh light and too much wall for my liking. I spent one happy winter living in the low-ceilinged, wood-panneled attic of our house while the windows in my room were refitted. The first thing I would see upon waking up was the sky, or sometimes the white-gey cover of snow that had accumulated on the roof overnight. It felt peaceful in this attic hideway.



So it's a happy coincidence that I do live in an attic now. On a sunny afternoon, when the light bounces off the mirror onto the ceiling, and there is jazz music, clinking of glasses and laughter floating in from accross the street, and the unused lamp sways gently in the cool breeze, and I lay in bed with a book, it feels like being on a ship, in a cosy cabin, rocking on a warm sea; safe but exposed in my high looking out point. I doze off and then jump up when I hear a roar of a fire burner, and people calling in the street. I jump to the window and there it is, the massive hot air baloon, nearly low enough for me to touch the basket, the sound of the fire burner deafening as it climbs over the roof, and disappears.

the reason

Life is about mattering (making things/people matter), about taking into account the entangled material existences of which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities - even the smallest cuts into the creative surface of living matter.
(paraphrasing Barad's (2007) 'Meeting the Universe Halfway')

So this blog will be a place to appreciate creative and beautiful and weird and interesting things in life, for the enjoyment of my friends and mine, and anyone whose attention I manage to attract with my musings!