Keep thinking about those wood-pigeons.
I hear them as I lay in bed this morning. A late night last night, but I still woke up early. I had slept with my window and curtains open, so the sunlight (sunlight!) woke me as I lay on the mattress. I could hear the wood-pigeons already, ever more insistent and nostalgic. Lulled back into a kind of sleep, I start to remember what they remind me so much of.
They remind me of the Black Woods in Forres (really called Cluny Woods) at the back of the house I lived in when I was 11 or 12. We never got far into the woods (too deep, too dark, too spooky) but lingered about the edges of the woods, just inside the thick and tangled trees. There's something oddly sticky about these memories, as if the air was heavy and thick, too much ice-cream in the air, and the ever deepening green of the woods seemed to make the woods even larger. As I said, we never got that far in (except for once) but on those first summery evenings, when the wood-pigeons were as loud and ever-present as they seem to be this year, the depths of those unmapped trees seemed both sinister and alluring. Some fairy tale mystery - that path through the woods you know you shouldn't walk, but still feel drawn too, A siren song from the trees, drawing us on, perhaps to that glade deep in the trees that caused such an inexplicable panic when I went there with my sister.
Is it that though? As I sit here (in the living room watching Come Dine With Me) I start thinking about other wood-pigeon echoes, maybe they remind me of Swakeleys Park in Ickenham, when I was a teenager, or perhaps that party in Worcester, walking back in the grey light of a May dawn with Joe along the banks of the river Severn.
The songs of wood-pigeons seem to thin time, and when they sing, memories become sharper, more resonant, more evocative.
It's all academic now anyway.
A few minutes ago, all I could hear was a seagull.
