The Birds
At 5.30 every evening the village of Faversham is suddenly completely devoid of humans. The bustling daytime streets of shoppers, moochers and shuffling oldsters are now eerily quiet. The gaily-painted dollhouse shops are all shuttered for the approaching night, creaking on their ancient foundations in the gentle evening breeze. I wondered how many Roman coins lie buried in the mud and chalk under the machine-cut neo-cobbles, how many Tudor, how many Stuart.
As I head up the gentle slope of the deserted street dozens of enormous speckled gulls wheel in. Their advance is heralded by the loneliest of squawking cries as they call instructions to each other offstage: it is a frigid, Arctic cry, redolent of ice and granite and loss and despair. Now they appear, gliding high over the rooftops from where they survey the prospects of Prospect Street. Here they come, spiraling down onto the empty street on their terrible 747 wings, their great flapping feet paddling them along solid ground, massive hooked beaks pointing the direction as they negotiate the rubbish bins. They strut about with all the proprietorial, arrogant confidence of Alex and his droogs. This is now their town, to rip up as they please. One is doing just this, as I walk past. It has pulled a large paper package out of a bin and has effortlessly torn it in pieces with a cruel beak that yesterday surgically eviscerated a penguin. Cold chips scatter about it as the bag disintegrates under its attack. It sets about wolfing them down, screaming in the face of any interloping gull that comes too near. It fixes me with its cold left eye as I pass, as if daring me to just try and disturb its meal. In that moment between us I am transported to a rocky ledge in the far north of the planet where the fight for survival is the only logic and where the strongest and most ruthless are the only ones that count, and for a moment I feel inadequate to the demands of evolution.
As I head up the gentle slope of the deserted street dozens of enormous speckled gulls wheel in. Their advance is heralded by the loneliest of squawking cries as they call instructions to each other offstage: it is a frigid, Arctic cry, redolent of ice and granite and loss and despair. Now they appear, gliding high over the rooftops from where they survey the prospects of Prospect Street. Here they come, spiraling down onto the empty street on their terrible 747 wings, their great flapping feet paddling them along solid ground, massive hooked beaks pointing the direction as they negotiate the rubbish bins. They strut about with all the proprietorial, arrogant confidence of Alex and his droogs. This is now their town, to rip up as they please. One is doing just this, as I walk past. It has pulled a large paper package out of a bin and has effortlessly torn it in pieces with a cruel beak that yesterday surgically eviscerated a penguin. Cold chips scatter about it as the bag disintegrates under its attack. It sets about wolfing them down, screaming in the face of any interloping gull that comes too near. It fixes me with its cold left eye as I pass, as if daring me to just try and disturb its meal. In that moment between us I am transported to a rocky ledge in the far north of the planet where the fight for survival is the only logic and where the strongest and most ruthless are the only ones that count, and for a moment I feel inadequate to the demands of evolution.
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