I learnt a new word today. Well, discovered. ‘Learnt’ makes me sound like a 4-year-old. Murmuration. Without knowing what it means, you might think that it’s the voice of the sea, gurgling and bubbling beneath the line of the coast. Or the gentle chatter of a coffee shop at midday, filled with babies crying and work colleagues speaking without anything really to say. Or that bit before the hush that sets in when an audience is awaiting the beginning of a performance. But it’s not any of those things; it’s the shape of the birds when they fly in unison against the sky. I have seen only a few murmuration’s in my time; one time, I was in Bali and saw the most frantic, desperate movement of bats under Tanah Lot, it was not quiet and still there like the postcards would have you believe, I was just part of the crowd ‘ooohing’ and ‘ahhhing’ on the edge of the cliff. Another time, I was in Devon, on Dartmoor National Park, watching starlings as they struggled to find anywhere to land.
I suppose one might consider crowds of people another sort of murmuration, albeit one far less synchronous. Although that is a matter of perspective, isn’t it? I’m sure the birds in their schools aren’t thinking about how their movements match one another, how pretty they look in the sky - they don’t consciously consider those in front of them and behind. It’s only from a distance one can really say, ‘that’s a murmuration’. In much the same way as no one considers anyone else on Tottenham Court Road. Perhaps at dusk, the birds fly over London, and think to themselves, ‘what glorious shapes those humans make amongst the concrete jungle they have built around them, to keep nature out, to keep us from getting too close’. Funnel-like, almost. Swelling and contracting with the landscape. It reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting. Except not some Baudelairian wannabe, some pseudo-flaneur; to be swept along in the crowd, caught up in it, unobserving.
It’s instinctive, a form of defence – for the birds, I mean. Although now I think about it, it may as well be protective for us too. I can’t decide whether I feel safer in a crowd or not. I mean, people say there’s safety in numbers, but people get caught up in crushes or get their phones snatched off them by a 15-year-old on a bike on the Southbank, all the time. I like the crowds – I’m always thinking ‘Ooh, what’s going on here, well whatever it is, I must be in the right place’, but perhaps they can also be scary. Maybe they’re scary from the outside too. Maybe the birds don’t find our murmurations something to be admired, but rather something to cower from, something that lets them know where not to land. There’s a hell of a lot of us, I admit. Over nine million in London alone. I have always liked falling asleep, thinking of London stretched out before me, surrounding me, hemmed in on all sides. But maybe that’s scary. There’s no space to breathe. My mother always says she could never breathe freely in London, there was not enough sky. She wants to see the sky. Maybe that’s what the birds think too. That’s why they’re in the sky.
I always know where the river is, an innate sense of the Thames I used to call it, but I was taking the piss. The air gets cooler, the sky gets wider – you know you’ll be crossing the bridge soon. The backstreets off the Strand, or the view from the Wetlands in Barnes, or Tower Bridge at midnight, with all the tourists hovering around as I turn my back and walk away. I distinctly remember someone, one of my lecturers during my undergraduate, saying that the bridges were their favourite part of London because they gave the city its space, a relief after so much concrete. I have always thought the best place to admire London is from a bridge, not the Shard, as people say. Right in the thick of it. So many. I had not thought death had undone so many. The birds, that is. Where do they all go?
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