Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks...the ones on your face

We've been having some weather of late in London.  I was up in town on Saturday, shopping for birthday gifts for a 14-year-old boy (good luck with that, by-the-way).  I was mooching through Oxford Circus when a bank of angry-looking grey cloud coalesced overhead and decided it had had enough.

An almighty peal of thunder rang out, which was as surprising as it was alarming because it was a decidedly chilly day.  Here in Eng-er-land, we exclusively associate thunder with extreme heat, i.e. anything over 19 degrees cee.  Shortly after the sound and fury came the payload: a short, but genuinely violent hail storm.  

I hid under the auspices of John Lewis to let the weather do its thang when out of the store rushed several excited tourists, phones in hand, and started filming the downpour.  They'd clearly never seen hail.  And some of them appeared so amazed and befuddled by the experience that I can only conclude that they never even heard of it.  Where on earth could you live to have not heard of all possible weather conditions, even the ones that don't attend in your locale?  As Del Boy once rightly observed: I've got a pair of desert boots indoors, but you don't see me down The Sahara, do you?

I've just finished reading The Mayor of Casterbridge.  I read quite a bit a Hardy in my youth.  Everyone in England seems to do this.  We read it under sufferance.  I'm not sure why.  I supposed because it so beloved of the public exams syllabus setters.  His work is afforded a certain caché, therefore, like Dickens.  I must say I quite enjoyed old MofC.  It's a bit of a curate's egg, but I was genuinely affected by the incorrigible descent of the protagonist.  Sad to witness.

The wind beneath my wings...squawk

I was wandering along a street in Poplar at lunchtime today with my nose buried in The Mayor of Casterbridge when my concentration was disturbed by the unmistakable hue and cry of a domestic budgie.  Despite its winning personality and gregarious nature, the budgerigar is not possessed of a sonorous voice.  Like most members of the parakeet family, it's makes a shrill short squawk in lieu of song.

I assumed initially that the noise was coming from the window of a nearby flat, but it sounded eerily close at hand.  I looked up, and there he was, bright green brer budgie, in the bough of a tree directly above me.  He was looking hither and yon and clambering gingerly up and down, as if looking for his bell or mirror.

I've kept budgies over the years, and, unusually for an avian, they betray their emotions through body language.  This little rotter was fretful.  He was trying to tough it out in front of the sparrows and starlings, but was fooling no-one.

Back-filling the story, I suppose he must have escaped from his owner's home shortly before I spotted him.  It got me to thinking: there must surely be a heavy-handed cod-insightful lesson one can glean from this episode.

And, indeed, there is: the budgie (let's suppose for the moment he's called Ian) had dreamt of escaping the bounds of his known universe and soaring upwards into the chewing-gum grey yonder of The Isle of Dogs since egghood.  His owner (for the purposes of this article, Mrs Carraway) attended to his needs, both material and emotional, as well as any owner could.  But of late she had become increasingly forgetful.  So it was then that she forgot the close the louvres fully before letting Ian out for his afternoon constitutional.

Mrs Carraway popped to the kitchen for moment to fetch some millet and a kitkat.  At that exact moment, Ian spotted the open window and seized his chance.  He shot out, front-crawled furiously across Narrow Street and nestled in the branches of the first tree he happened across. 

His tiny budgie face was flushed from a mixture of effort and excitement.  Then for the first time he was able to draw breath and assess his new environment.  Sweet Jesus, it's huge.  The scope and animation of the outside world overwhelms him for a moment, and he rocks back on his talons.  This was a mistake, he concludes, a big budgie mistake.  No matter though; he can simply fly back.

He tilts his noggin and turns an eye to the low-rise he calls home.  Oh, no!  There are dozens of flats, each one identical to its neighbour.  Which one is Mrs Carraway's?  Chances are Ian will never find out.

So let that be a lesson to you.  It's better to be locked in a cage in a Peabody flat in Poplar than to be twenty foot up in a Silver Birch tree across the road...in Poplar.  Tell your friends.