Fragile

The eastern sky glowed golden yesterday morning, over the chimney pots and the tower of All Saints’ Parish Church. I saw the outline of a hundred wheeling birds, swallows I think, gathering for their departure to North Africa. Later as I went walking, some half-denuded shrubs were full of birds chirping and hopping excitedly from branch to branch. I don’t know what species, but there was a white flash on their wings. Then as I crossed a stubble-field, moving out from the hill’s shadow to the sunny part, I heard more birds, larks surely, and they were excited too. On this chill day, the last in November, when gloves would have been welcome, a mass emigration was planned! (Surely this is a bit late.)

Bringing Karleen to work earlier, I’d taken a back road to avoid traffic, but this was busy too and we proceeded in stops and starts. I’d been aware of a motorcyclist behind me for a couple of miles, cautious and patient. At last there was nothing coming the other way, and when we halted behind a stationary queue, he carefully overtook us. A few seconds later at exactly the wrong moment a car came out from a side road, just as cautiously as the motorcyclist, because he could not see till he had stuck his nose out. The motorcyclist swerved to avoid collision and fell off, rolling on his back with legs in the air. He got up a little shaky and immediately tried to push his bike to the edge of the road. No one helped. I wanted to get out and at least offer friendly words in his moment of shock, humiliation and pain. Our line moved forward and I wanted to park up the side road so as to see what we could do, but he’d walked up there himself, and now he was talking to a sympathetic woman pedestrian. Such a trivial incident it was, yet strangely moving, as if I knew him personally.

When has life not been fragile? Every mother has to let go of the son she has carried in her body and then suckled, to possible danger or death. One mother, whose son was killed in the Twin Towers on 9/11, met Aicha el-Wafi, the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted of participation in this attack. They have become friends, offering one another understanding and support. I hope this kind of thing catches on.

Rama the other day drew my attention to a BBC documentary, Being Indian in which we see the role in an Indian village of the Untouchables. Their low caste leads to their being so reviled that they can barely survive and are all but excluded from free education. Yet they play a vital role in maintaining the important Hindu tradition of funeral pyres and consignment of the burnt remains to the river Ganges. Ill-treatment is part of the human condition.

I live in a land where they don’t let you starve or freeze, and no one is excluded from education. The main commodity on sale is “peace of mind”. But here as everywhere we remain vulnerable to being cheated, jilted, insulted, belittled, ignored . . . dreaded reminders of death. Sometimes we’d like to leave these wintry things behind, and migrate like those birds to warmer climes.