Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
London Birds are a special breed, entirely different in character to the ones that share our home in the countryside. I once stood in Borough Market, eating a sandwich, when a Starling came and perched, not a foot away and eye level with me, on some railings. He then gestured impatiently, pointing his beak from sandwich to me and back again. One needn’t be an animal whisperer to decipher the order that was being given, so I tore off some crust and handed it to him. He snatched it and stood there eating, chaotically. He didn’t even fly away, just looked at me occasionally as if to say, “You still here?”.
The Pigeons, too, though jumpier than their Starling brethren, are a far tougher bunch than those in the countryside. In the city you’ll often see feral Pigeons limping about, missing a foot or an eye, looking as though they’ve just returned from the front. They are a long-suffering Bird, once domesticated and assumed as an integral part of society, only to go out of fashion and be relegated to the streets; labeled as a nuisance, as vermin. How fickle favour can be.
From the back of a cab I see a street cleaner standing by the Marble Arch fountains, picking out bits of edible rubbish from the large bins he’d collected and throwing them towards a gathering of grateful Pigeons. It is a balm, to witness gestures of interspecies kindness. It reminds me of the many thousands of acts of goodwill which go unseen, but are nonetheless committed, throughout the day. Perhaps they even outnumber the acts of cruelty.
Not 200 feet away, a man naked from the waist down rearranges the cardboard boxes that he seems to use for bedding while, not 20 feet from him, a golden Ferrari (no joke, it was gold) idles loudly (because God forbid anyone miss it) at a red light. How the fuck is this where 300,000 years of evolution has landed our species?
“What’s that, darlin’?” asks the cab driver, after I accidentally say that thought out loud—a truly dangerous habit of mine. “Nothing!” I smile, trying to conceal my misanthropy, “Just talking to myself!”. “First sign of madness, that is!” he jokes. I wonder what the second sign is. I wonder where, in these chronological indicators of madness, the pathological hoarding of wealth in the face of abject poverty comes in. I fear that greed is more a measure of sanity, nowadays. May we all go stark raving mad.
I pass a record shop just around the corner from where we used to live, which I would often visit with a dear friend of mine, Daniel, years ago. Daniel was prescribed a medication that did him irreparable psychological and physical harm, and he took his own life after trying so very hard, for years, to manage living in a body that could no longer experience joy. The unimaginable torture of having to live in a world you once loved, with your ability to love it now amputated, always seemed a mythic kind of cruelty. I take a moment to allow the internal tantrum that I’m throwing to play out, muttering away through gritted teeth, “Fuck you God, fuck you Death, fuck the medical-industrial complex and fuck whatever it is that’s made the abdication of responsibility so fucking fashionable”.
With this rare day to myself I go to the National Gallery, but the crowds are too much for my now distinctly ungenerous mood so I head instead to the National Portrait Gallery, to take in the faces of the good, the great and the abominable (I see you, Margaret Thatcher). While there I look for a work which is going largely unnoticed and I quickly find one in the form of a pencil portrait of Terry Higgins. Higgins was one of the first people in the UK to die of an AIDS-related illness1, and I read on the plaque beside his portrait that he died in 1982, aged 37, in St Thomas’ Hospital, London. The same place I was born.
The portrait of Terry is a tender and haunting one, based on three photographs of him during different stages of his life. Over the shoulders of the central Terry are subtle yet striking images; one of him as a young man and one of him a few weeks before his Death. A life, in three parts. I suppose we all have these versions of ourselves, hovering over our shoulders.
Lost in the intensity of such a dense distillation of an entire being, the room begins to darken and I feel as though I am falling.
Opening my eyes to the gallery ceiling and a woman saying “You’re ok! You’re ok…”, I piece together that I must have fainted. I throw a quick search back through time to see if I’d eaten that day and I had not, so I’d only myself to blame for this rather mortifying turn of events. I sit myself up and start apologising profusely (because…British) while the woman knelt by me is very firmly telling her husband, “Peter, get your sandwich, quickly!”. I insist that Peter keep his sandwich as I’ve something to eat in my bag, but Peter tells me I’ll be making his life easier by taking it, so I do.
Peter, his wife and I then proceed to sit against the wall, underneath the three Terrys, as Peter’s wife (Gillian) holds my hand. I can feel her subtly taking the pulse in my wrist as she does so. Peter sweetly chats away—the train only took two and half hours from Bournemouth. Isn’t London busy? Why is everything so expensive? Why aren’t people friendly? Are there cats here? Do people who live in London not have cats? All excellent questions.
When this pair of truly delightful human beings are satisfied that I am well enough to go about my day, we part ways; me unable to thank them enough and them shrugging it off, as if their generosity of spirit is a given. But it isn’t. And I want to tell them that it isn’t, and to implore, to beg them never to lose it, but they are lost to the crowds, and to the mean and seemingly cat-less streets of London.
On the train, leaving the city, I can feel the weight of the day curving my spine into a C, but I can’t do anything about it until I am home—because home is where we put the heavy things down. And home is where we are forgiven.
Home is also where the Pigeons are in exceptionally good condition. How I wish it were so for all of them. How I wish we had evolved into a species that considered every life and every Death, and every Bird, to be equal…
Later that week, holding a Long Tailed Tit the size of a grape in the palm of my hand, I catch myself, riddled with hypocrisy, telling this tiny Bird whose open and expectant beak is no bigger than a mustard seed, that he is the best Bird in the whole entire world.
Yours in aimless flight…
Friends, I met with the incomparably kind soul that is
of recently to talk about…well, lots of things, but naturally Death and Birds came up. If you would like to watch that meeting, follow the link below:Also, Nick Hornby (yep, the
) has joined Substack and he found Death & Birds—he was then gracious enough to mention it in the below post. So, that was surreal and obviously life is all downhill from here, but I had a good run, so it was worth it.After his Death, Terry’s partner and friends went on to start the Terry Higgins Trust, one of Europe’s largest HIV and sexual health charities. They do extraordinary work: https://www.tht.org.uk
This one’s a cathedral window, Chloe. Every sentence a colored shard.
Welcome to all the new Death & Birders. It seems the world is discovering our Chloe and it's such a beautiful thing to witness. It's impossible not to fall in love with such a gentle spirit who has this gorgeous whispery voice of an angel that can employ the word fuck so appropriately. There are Sunday mornings when Chloe does not post. I don't think it's coincidental that I sputter through those weeks like a car running on fumes. Today's post was both devastating and soaring. But that's the magic trick of Death & Birds.