Today is the first day in two weeks when the afternoon sun is warm enough to continue my reading outside on the sunlit verandah. And, of course, it's never long before I have company; this time it's from a pair of almost tame butcherbirds who follow me wherever I go - well, not as far as the Bay, but you know what I mean, don't you?
They are called butcherbirds for their peculiar feeding behaviour of impaling prey on thorns, twigs, or in tree forks, similar to how butchers hang meat. This habit allows them to either tear the meat off more easily or store it for later consumption, creating a "larder". When they visit me, they find a larder of finely-chopped devon waiting for them.
And so the afternoon slowly continues, with me watching the butcher birds, or reading, or looking at the river. Like the men in "Moby Dick", most of us like to stare at the sea - or a river, if no sea is nearby. Is it because that's where we all came from? Unlike the whales who started out on land and then went back to the sea. Maybe that is why, when they emerge from the water to breathe on the surface, they stare back at the land to get a glimpse of us. And yet, if they were to reclaim their place on land, they would be crushed to death by their own weight.
Which reminds me of what Roger Deakin wrote in his beautiful ode to the act of swimming outdoors, "Waterlog - A Swimmer's Journey through Britain":
"When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is - water - and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached at birth ourselves. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terri-fying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control." [click here]
I don't know about you, but I have absolutely no memories of what I experienced before I was born (in fact, my earliest memory is of being flown out of Berlin in 1949 during the Allied airlift), but if nothing else, you have now heard about Roger Deakin's "Waterlog", which I highly recommend, and you've googled for the meaning of the word 'amniotic'.
Ramona Koval's love letter to reading is drawing to a close, and so is the sun, and it's time to get back to that electric heater in the bedroom.
