The Sea Inside

away, of shabby oil-stained shorts and basin-washed T-shirts, of being removed from family and friends by half a dozen time zones. I feel homeless, rather than homesick, faced with the familiar strangeness of this place, so orderly like home, yet on the edge of utter wilderness. More than anything, I feel abandoned, as I always have.
    My notebook sits on my bedside cabinet. Everything is invested in its pages: the postcards and dried leaves and ticket stubs I’ve stuck in it, the slivers of whale skin, the sketches of unknown places and animals. In the absence of anything else, it is my home, my life spiral-bound between black card, the anchor I let down.
    Maybe I’ll never get back. In my dreams I sink into invisible magnetic fields and invisible suffering; my head is filled with migrations and invasions, travellers and victims. All the while, giant albatrosses glide and great whales dive into abyssal canyons, and Hector’s tiny dolphins play hide and seek in the water.
    It’s time to go home.

The sea in me

Time has never existed, and never will; it is a
purely artificial arrangement. It is eternity now,
it always was eternity, and always will be.

R ICHARD J EFFERIES ,
The Story of My Heart,
1883



T here could hardly be a more common bird, yet you could travel around half the world and never hear anything so beautiful as a blackbird in a suburban garden. Their big eyes sense the slight slip from darkness to the semblance of light before all other garden birds; only robins can rival them in this keen awareness. I listen to the first notes of the first song, a lone voice in the dark, joined by another, then another, until they form a circle of sound. From dawn to dusk they rise and fall, fit and start, from roofs to trees, announcing their allure. Their songs are asymmetrical, apparently random; phrases are thrown out to be echoed by rivals, in the way humpback whales take up that year’s song and repeat it through the oceans. As the philosopher and musician David Rothenberg showed me, when you speed up the song of a humpback, it sounds very much like birdsong, with the same ‘sustained whistles, rhythmic chirps, and noisy
brawphs
’.
    Each sequence is its own narrative, precisely measured out. Blackbirds have the ability to sound both ridiculous and sublime at the same time, with their querying intonation ending in an upnote, like a teen’s mallspeak – duh-duh-
duh
?; or duh-duh-
lu
, duh-duh-
lu
! But theirs is a serious intent, bent on preventing any incursion into their fiefdom, as well as sounding sexy to a potential mate. They’ll fly just a few feet off the ground, to evade predators from above – although a habit which made sense when their only enemies were raptors is less useful now that their low flight-paths take them directly into potentially lethal traffic; it amazes me, as yet another black streak almost zooms through my bike wheels, that they don’t sustain more casualties. They must retain a race memory of when all this was only heathland. A blackbird defends its territory all its life; some may live for up to twenty years. The same bird bobs and bows and runs across my garage roof year after year, looking up at me in turn.
    How can such a grey, wet day be so beautiful? After days of rain I ride out at dawn, taking my chance during a brief interlude of dryness. There’s nothing to focus on, just cloud. Under such skies, anything is a gain. It’s May Day. The rain intensifies the smell of the morning. The woods through which the road runs lean over and meet tree-to-tree, negating the tarmac below. At the beach, the water is flat calm. The world has opened up again.
    A new shape appears high over the shore; the slender wings of a swallow, zigzagging its way from the sea to the trees, thousands of miles from sub-Saharan Africa. Later, I’ll watch them from water level as they swoop within inches of my head, so close that I can see every detail: blue-black backs as iridescent as a mineral, pure white bellies and rosy chins. To the Romans, the swallow represented the household gods because it nested in the eaves; it was unlucky to kill one. But its name comes from Scandinavia, whose early Christians believed that it had flown over the Crucifixion crying
Svala! Svala!
– Console! Console!, and called it
svalow
in tribute to its piety.
    The birds’ annual disappearance was a source of mystery. Some said they flew to the moon, or even changed species. As late as the sixteenth century it