The week has passed holidayingly, pausing only to upload smug photos of obscenely picturesque coastlines to social media with the sole purpose of irritating everyone stuck in an office.
Aware that no holiday is complete without a dose of unnecessary drama, I obligingly slice the tip of my finger off while preparing supper on the first day.
Is it in a good cause, you wonder? A white truffle, perhaps? A precious smoked meat whose savour can only be truly appreciated when sliced thin as thin with the sharpest of knives? Or maybe I’m trying to emulate this scene?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yztx8qfoNu0
Almost. It’s a beetroot.
I love beetroot, but honestly not enough to think the trade of my fingertip is a worthwhile deal.
The nurse, laconic, used to it all, asks what I’d done.
‘Beetroot. Mandolin.’
‘Oh Christ, is it mandolin season again? Has Jamie Oliver been using one on the telly?’
Buoyed by this pithy summary of the fundamental and ineffable stupidity of mankind, I thank him for his efficient dressing of my wound and take my leave.
(Brief NHS praise klaxon sidebar: I cannot imagine being a doctor or nurse. The work they do is beyond my lily-livered ken. Eternal applause.
Brief second sidebar to people who wonder why I was slicing a beetroot with a musical instrument: it is not the mandolin that appears near the end of this clip:
I fear briefly that the damage to my finger might curtail my binocular-fiddling activities, but the fates are kind, so one morning I take myself off to St Catherine’s Point to stare at an empty sea through a telescope for a couple of hours.
If golf is a good walk spoiled, I wonder what Mark Twain would have to say about seawatching. It’s a specialist activity, reserved for hard core birders. They gaze over roiling seas in high winds, miraculously able to distinguish two distant specks as, respectively, manx and Cory’s shearwaters. I have neither the experience nor the knowledge to do it properly.
But this part of the coast is obscenely picturesque, as I think I’ve mentioned, and the sun is glinting off the sea in a manner reminiscent of the gleam in Viv Richards’s eye just over 41 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Eh2lQRfvE
I figure that, birds or no birds, an early morning walk can only be a sensible idea.
A couple of gannets lope gamely low across the sea. Three herring gulls defy them by flying stubbornly in the other direction. An incongruous heron appears from below the cliff and makes its stately way OH MY GOD WHAT’S THAT?
A bird of prey, small, nimble, elegant, somehow unusual, swooping into my view and out again behind the cliff edge. It’s a merlin or maybe a hobby come back you bastard ah bugger it’s gone.
The sight is so fleeting I have little to go on except a general impression, and my knowledge isn’t depthy enough, and the light is all wrong to see plumage features, and what would a hobby be doing at the seaside anyway it must have been a merlin but wasn’t it a bit big for a merlin and it can’t be anyway not at this time of year OH MY GOD IT’S BACK NOW STAY STILL YOU SOD.
It doesn’t stay still. It doesn’t stay. I’m none the wiser.
I console myself with swallows, a steady trickle of them heading east along the coastline. I’m tempted to point them south towards Africa, but their kind have been doing this for millennia. They know where they’re going.
IT’S BACK NOW THIS TIME WILL YOU JUST ah sod it.
It’s gone round the corner. I pursue, hoping against hope that not only can I avoid walking over the edge of the cliff, but that it will be sitting obligingly on a fence post when I catch up with it.
I catch up with it. It’s sitting obligingly on a fence post.
Now then you bugger, now I’ve got you in my sights, what are you?
It’s a kestrel. How I ever thought it was a hobby or a merlin I have absolutely no idea.
There are those who would be disappointed, who would sniff at a kestrel. And briefly I join their number. Kestrels are familiar, and a small part of me craves something unusual.
But then it flies up from its post, loops upwards with insane elegance, and hovers over the cliff edge, silhouetted against the eternal cliffs and the sky, which is the colour some people like to call cerulean or cyan, but I’m going to call blue.
It’s an everyday aerobatic miracle of unceasing wonder, enhanced by the outrageous beauty of the backdrop. The kestrel’s head, despite a gusting headwind, remains absolutely motionless, the bird making myriad tiny adjustments of wings and tail so that it can fix on the target. To some people, it’s just a kestrel hovering, but when you look there are miracles everywhere.
It’s nourishing, this sight. I have no more need for loping gannets or plodding gulls. Besides, it’s breakfast time.
As I collapse the telescope, I bang my wounded finger against the tripod. It bloody hurts, but I don’t care.
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