During lockdown, my normal frantic life ground to a halt, and instead of fruitless busyness I was forced into a stunned stasis. No rushing around meant that I had no choice but to observe and listen to where I was. Living under the Heathrow flight path, I heard the sound of planes every minute replaced by strange twittering and quacking and cawing noises. Investigating the source, I became fascinated by the feathered creatures floating on the river, gliding in the empty sky, and sitting on the rails of my balcony. Condemned to solitary confinement by my newly acquired “extremely vulnerable” status, I was grateful for their company.
One particular strutting, hip-swaying, jaunty crow entranced me. If I used a special wooing tone of voice he would stop, cock his ear in my direction, think about it, defecate on my expensive tiles and prance on. I became obsessed with winning his approval. I tempted him onto the table and then to stand by the door. My mission was to train him to the point where I could emerge back into the eventually virus-free world, elegantly flaunting a crow on my shoulder.
Desperate for contact with living creatures, I also struck up a relationship with a mouse. During the nightly programming of depressing bulletins with sober medical men giving us the facts, or Matt Hancock straining to remember the latest government misinformation, I would be comforted by the appearance of a little mouse in my kitchen.
I used my soothing crow voice to say “hello” and I swear it would do a little pirouette before going on its way. I would not have been in the least surprised if it had turned up wearing a tutu.
So far, so charming.
But now things have returned to normality, my newfound relationship with the natural world has gone sour. The animals are taking advantage of my friendship. Give them an inch…
I am now besieged by fierce crows and fecund mice in my house. I decided to take a stand when a huge creature—that I suspect is one of my mice evolving into a new breed of rat—ignored my stamping feet and charged towards me, teeth bared. A slight exaggeration, but it was scary, forcing me to stand on my chair like a Victorian maiden.
I wished my erstwhile friend no ill, so I consulted a well-known pest control company to evolve a humane method for bidding it farewell. They insisted on disinfecting the whole house, which they declared was infested and a danger to my health. Then they set up, at vast expense, a system where there is no poisoning or backbreaking—the mice just run into a slightly ungainly white box and go to sleep gently and painlessly, then a man comes to remove the body. That is the theory. Or the sales pitch.
The first night I watched two mice come and momentarily look at the trap, then proceed to walk daintily around it. I tried laying a trail of cheese towards the little hole they were meant to go in. They ate the cheese with relish, danced with several friends and went home—wherever that is. So far, I have paid hundreds of pounds for the capture of one single, obviously very silly, mouse. When I complained to the mouse assassin, he told me that they are very intelligent creatures. I told him that I had hoped he would be more intelligent than them. Three weeks on the mice are still winning.
Despite the reputation of being bright birds, my particular crow is proving tragically stupid. I have, on one wall of my balcony, cleverly installed a mirror to make it seem like an extension of the river view. One day my crow caught sight of his reflection. He walked up and down, puzzled and hurt by this other crow not reacting to his noisy chat-up line. Every morning as dawn broke he would appear before the mirror, loudly summoning up his new friend. Receiving no satisfactory reaction, he started trying to kiss his sweetheart, then to peck her and eventually to wage a full-scale attack on the mirror. On one occasion, he brought two other crows to help him, thrashing and clawing at the equally angry subject of his obsession.
Alas, the only solution has been to cover the mirror. Not just with paper or a curtain, which he summarily destroyed, but with firmly fixed cladding.
So, I am left with a gloomy balcony, and the guilt about a broken-hearted crow occasionally standing on the table looking at me reproachfully, forlorn and mentally disturbed.
Everyone says “get a cat.” I was given a kitten during lockdown but could not deal with its energy with my dodgy back. Maybe I should adopt an elderly, homeless puss, who hopefully won’t outlive me. But would my wily mice and psychotic crow be too much for him as well?
