I had a bit of a moment this week. Three, in fact.
I’d been to Barnes to look for a bittern – an endeavour, by the way, that thirty years ago would have elicited a mocking guffaw from any right-minded birder. Back then, the site of my quest was nothing but a cluster of disused reservoirs. And the bittern, that magnificent, elusive, flolloping, dagger-billed camouflage-meister of the reedbeds – like a brown heron with mumps – was as good as extinct in Britain. Gone. Defunct. Disparu.
But now, with the reservoirs transformed into the award-winning London Wetland Centre, and the bittern population booming as healthily as, well, as a male bittern in spring, it’s a realistic enterprise.
Strange thing, the birder’s mind. The Wetland Centre boasts exotic geese, rare ducks, magnificent cranes, all displaying within easy view, no binoculars required. But they’re all part of the centre’s wildfowl collection, their wings nicely clipped so they stick around and put on a show for the punters. And birders have an instinctive aversion to nature handed to them (as it were) on a plate.
There are goldeneye here, and smew – two varieties of diving duck that in my ‘big’ year of 2016 I went literally from Dungeness to Lindisfarne to get fleeting and distant glimpses of. And there they are, tame as anything. As I watch, a male goldeneye flings its head back in the extraordinary and energetic display that makes it look just a little unhinged, as if it’s saying to the females ‘Breed with me! Breed with me! I can touch my arse with the back of my head! It’s a desirable evolutionary trait!’ Meanwhile the female smew, known as ‘redheads’, surge across the water with purpose; lean, intent, the desire to distance themselves from those head-flinging weirdos apparent in every fibre of their being.
I look at them. Of course I do. They’re birds, after all. I’m not mad.
But for the main event I strike out to the further reaches of the reserve. I’m duly rewarded. Two snipe, so often indistinguishable from a patch of muddy grass, fossick around in the fringes of the reedbed about ten yards from the hide; a couple of gadwall, an anonymous-looking duck of whose subtle vermiculations and unassuming nature I’m inordinately fond, float demurely just beyond them; a coot fracas breaks out, as they’re wont to do – all this, and much more, I see, watch, admire.
But a bittern is something special, something to be sought out.
Part of the appeal lies in their elusiveness. Those flashy birds, the ones out in the open, with their bright colours and look-at-me demeanours, they’re all lovely and everything, but give me a good camouflager and hear me purr. Honestly, just about my happiest twenty minutes of 2016 were spent in a gusty downpour opposite a large bush in Dungeness, looking for (and finding, I might add) a long-eared owl that had spent fifteen years at chameleon school preparing for just such a moment.
The bittern is a good camouflager. Here’s a picture of it. No, really, I absolutely promise you. Look closely.
As a reference point, here’s another one I made earlier (just over a year earlier, in fact), on a day when boldness, and probably hunger, propelled this bird out onto the ice.
They are, by any measurement, extraordinary and arresting birds. Even the tiniest glimpse I had of it made my day. I wouldn’t top it. Time to go home.
If there’s one thing I learned as a child (and especially as a parent) it’s this: always go to the loo before embarking on a journey. What I see out of the loo window at the London Wetland Centre entrenches this principle as one to live by for ever.
There are ducks, geese, coots, all going about their business in the usual way. But in the foreground, arresting and elegant, two mute swans.
We get used to them, these wonderful birds, inured to their magical combination of size and strength and grace by familiarity, barely giving them a second glance as we walk round the park.
These two, though. They command my attention.
The display lasts no longer than twenty seconds. I know I’m the only one to see it. It’s intimate, tender. I almost feel like an intruder.
But I watch anyway.
They know the moves, perform them as if rehearsed. A touch of heads, the resulting heart-shape almost corny in its picture postcard perfection. It’s as if they know the connotations and are trolling me, like a child knowing it’s cute and playing up to the grown-ups.
‘You humans are preternaturally disposed to over-romanticise nature, aren’t you? Well take a look at THIS, suckers!’
Then a brushing of cheeks – mwah mwah – and a gentle twining of necks, a delicate ballet of swan love.
They’re monogamous, these birds, linked to the same mate for years, if not for life. I get to anthropomorphise them a bit.
They’re not the swans of Sibelius, though. That would be too neat. It’s a fine distinction, but the swans of Sibelius are whooper swans – slightly slenderer of neck, yellower of bill. And these swans aren’t soaring majestically over a lake in the middle of a pine forest; they’re canoodling intimately just outside a lavatory window on a lake a mile from the South Circular. It’s a triumph of beauty over mundanity.
The swans of Sibelius take to the air at letter E in the last movement of his Fifth Symphony, and 25 bars after that I have my third moment of the week.
The me who sits in a hide looking at a blizzard of reeds trying to find a bittern isn’t the same as the me who stands in front of musicians waving his arms in the hope that sound will appear. There’s a cloak we wear, a public persona. It’s familiar territory for the conductor. Well, for this one at least. It’s not always conscious, this transformation. Sometimes I slip into the role almost without realising it. But there are days when I have to pause for a few seconds, as if standing in front of a wardrobe and choosing a suit.
And then, the job being what it is, energy is expended. Not just the physical energy of the waving of the arms, but the mental, psychological energy of bringing the players to the music, the music to the players, of drawing the best out of both.
Let’s not overstate things, though. More often than not, the players manage just fine without you. Cynical old goat that I am, I’m more inclined to describe The Heavenly Art of Conducting as ‘the ability to stand in front of a group of musicians and not make things worse’ than to over-mysticise the role.
That moment, then. It’s just a first rehearsal, amateur musicians sight-reading difficult music after the Christmas break. Fingers rusty, ears not yet attuned. I’m standing in front of them, trying not to make things worse. This music is not for the faint-hearted. Even the better players have to concentrate fiercely, picking out as many notes as they can, muscle-memory working overtime. I try not to stop too often. It’s a recce mission, an overview, getting the big picture of the piece before the close-up work can begin in future rehearsals.
And now, 25 bars after letter E, I have my moment.
You know these moments, I know you do. They happen when music touches places not accessible to anything else. It might be in the music of Stevie Wonder or Tchaikovsky or Abba or Janelle Monae or Hildegard of Bingen or Björk or Aswad or Bach or Pixies or Billy Holiday or Perry Como or Gershwin or Lonnie Donegan or Buena Vista Social Club or yes, even in the music of Ed Sheeran. It will be something that makes you go ‘ah – that’, and it will have a physical effect on you, and maybe you’ll close your eyes for a second and savour it, and maybe somewhere behind them a tear will poke its head out and say ‘gotcha’ before you give it a firm rebuke and with a shake of the head and a tut and a ‘stuff and nonsense’ you’ll be back to your normal, presentable self.
Or maybe you’ll submit yourself to the moment and allow yourself to dissolve in what people sometimes call ‘a really good cry’, but is in fact often a bloody awful one, because that music has put its finger on your barest nerve, held it there for a second, and then twisted.
This is one of those moments, and I’m having it in public.
Because 25 bars after letter E in the last movement of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony is in fact the moment when the swans, having taken off from the lake in the pine forest, shift their angle of bank and veer towards you, and the sun, shining from a clear blue sky, catches their plumage in such a way as to reveal the majesty of the Great Green Arkleseizure (or whatever deity you choose to worship) in all his her or its glory.
Seeing this moment on the page, cold ink on dead paper, is enough to set me off; hearing it in my mind’s ear, I have to sit down for a second; standing in the middle of the physicality of it, air vibrating all around me, even in this thoroughly imperfect, sketchy rendition, and I’m done for.
But I can’t be done for, so we carry on, and nobody really notices because they’re too busy playing the notes and counting bars rest, and then we finish and I take the swans out of the rehearsal and onto the Bakerloo line and all the way home.
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