The Art of Fun

They’ve gone.

I got home late on Friday, greeted by uncanny warmth, a grumpy cat, and that slightly odd smell your house has when you come back to it after a week away. An overnight stop, no more. I was around for just long enough to discard junk mail and to register an absence.

The swifts have gone.

When I opened the doors early on Saturday morning to say a brief hello to the garden (it didn’t say hello back, the bastard), there was a distinct and particular stillness in the air. A robin gave an alarm call, a blue tit made a feeder foray, a jay agitated from two gardens down. But of the swifts there was neither sight nor sound.

This wasn’t the ‘we’ve just nipped off to give somebody else a bit of excitement for once’ stillness we’ve occasionally had since they first arrived in early May – when that’s happened I’ve been relaxed about it, knowing that come the evening they’ll be back, chasing each other through the gloaming in a perpetual swifty game of ‘it’. No, somehow I knew that this was the ‘we’ve just nipped off to Africa (AFRICA – the insane distance of it still befuddles me) for nine months, love you, mwah, bye’ stillness that means autumn has begun, however early and wrong it feels to be saying that with four Test matches still to be played.

Call me a ludicrous fantasist, but the sky did seem differently empty, as if they’d taken their aura with them. But maybe it’s my imagination, the same imagination that insists, in the face of all scientific disapproval of such anthropomorphising, that these miraculous birds, when I watch them soaring and floating high in the air with little waggles of the wing, then screaming low over our terrace, in and out of each other’s slipstreams like Maverick and Iceman, are basically doing it because it’s enormous FUN.

I stood there for a minute, remembering the pleasure those birds have given me, wondering exactly where they were at that moment, how far they’d got on their ridiculous journey, and hoping against hope that they would come swooping back into view for a final goodbye. And as I stood, a woodpigeon emerged noisily from the tree at the bottom of the garden and did this: flap climb flap climb flap flap flap WINGCLAP whhhheeeeeee gliiiiiiiiide.

Don’t even begin to tell me it did it for any other reason than aimless pleasure.

I could, I suppose, have tried to emulate it. I had a few minutes to spare. I could have run around the garden, arms outspread and making aeroplane noises, or attempted a probably doomed cartwheel, or sat in the swing chair and tried to make it go as high as possible. Some sort of nod to the birds’ superiority in the random hedonism department.

But I didn’t. I threw a couple of jumpers into my suitcase as insurance against the Caledonian climate, briefly appeased the unappeasable feline, and took the train to Edinburgh.

Guess what I saw this morning, wheeling across the sky above the Water of Leith? There were four of them, higher than high. One of them gave a little screech to catch my attention, and I flung my head back to get a glimpse of them, nearly cricking my neck in the process. I like to think the wing waggle one of them gave as I watched them disappear over the rooftops was for my benefit.

Bloody marvellous birds.