The dog index governs the meadow while a grandmother delivers four hundred years of policy
Wednesday. The parakeets held their morning session in the plane tree at six, full attendance, volume unregulated, and I lay listening to them shriek the borough awake and thought, as I always think, that of all the improbable things London has absorbed, the flocks of emerald parrots are the one I would least have predicted and now cannot imagine subtracted. Nobody agrees how they got here, the legends are legion, escaped film sets, liberated pet shops, a pair released on Carnaby Street in the sixties, each story better and less verified than the last, and the parakeets, wisely, confirm nothing, maintaining the mystery like celebrities protecting an origin story worth more untold. They are Londoners now, whatever the paperwork says. They queue at the feeders. Nearly.
The park this morning was in its full weekday liturgy, and I took the long circuit to attend all its stations. The dawn dog congregation at the meadow, where the owners stand in their fixed circle performing the ancient rite of talking exclusively about the dogs while the dogs, ten yards off, conduct their own society with better manners and clearer hierarchies. I know every dog’s name on that meadow, Biscuit, Nelson, Clive, the pug, and not one owner’s, and this is universal, the owners know each other solely as Biscuit’s mum and Nelson’s dad, an entire social network indexed by dog, functioning for years, no surnames exchanged, none needed. The Royal Parks people steward the grand parks magnificently, but the true governance of the small parks is this, the circle, the index of dogs, the agreed fiction that we are here for the exercise.
The Bench Committee
Station two, the benches, each with its memorial plaque, and I have come to know the plaques the way one knows neighbours. For Edna, who loved this view. Reg and Joan, forty years of Sundays. And my favourite, the bench by the pond, In memory of Arthur, who was usually right, a plaque that tells you everything about Arthur, about the marriage that composed it, about the specific smiling exasperation that outlives us if we are lucky. I sat with Arthur a while this morning, as I do, and watched the pond’s business, the moorhens fussing, the heron standing in its permanent audit, and an elderly man feeding the ducks correct food, the proper pellets, from a labelled tub, with the quiet defiance of a man who has read the signage wars of the last decade and complied, but on his own schedule. The ducks know him. The heron ignores him. The heron ignores everyone. The heron has seen empires of picnickers rise and fall.
Station three, the outdoor gym, where the machines with their mysterious resistance are used at seven by the serious lycra people and at ten by the retired, slowly, socially, the air-walker becoming a conversation platform, two ladies swinging gently in parallel discussing a third lady, absent, the machine converting gossip into cardio at a modest but sustainable rate. And station four, the playground, from a respectful distance, where the toddlers run their morning stock exchange, all shrieks and sand futures, overseen by parents and grandparents on the perimeter benches wearing the two faces of that trade, total boredom and total vigilance, simultaneously, an expression achieved nowhere else in human life. I raised my takeaway cup to a grandfather on the perimeter this morning, one professional to another, and he raised his in return without breaking surveillance, a full salute conducted entirely in peripheral vision, and I count it among the day’s finer diplomatic exchanges. We of the benches understand each other. The vigilance is the love wearing its work clothes, and the boredom is the uniform, and both are worn with honours, daily, unthanked, on every perimeter in this city.
The Parakeet Question, Continued
On the way out, the parakeets descended on the horse chestnut by the gate, a full squadron, screaming like a playground themselves, and a small girl below pointed up and said to her grandmother, are those from here, and the grandmother, a Londoner to her boots, considered the question with the seriousness it deserved and said, they are now, love, and diary, I nearly applauded at the gate. They are now. Four hundred years of this city’s entire policy, delivered at parakeet volume, under a chestnut, to a girl in red wellingtons. The Huguenots, the Jamaicans, my own grandparents off the boat with a suitcase and a wrong-season coat, the parrots, the lot, they are now, love. There is no better history of London and the historians can keep trying.
Filed with the satirical desk at The London Prat, and posted to Bohiney Magazine, whose correspondent replies that America’s equivalent unearned bird is the flock of feral chickens of certain cities, likewise unexplained, likewise beloved, likewise citizens by squatters’ rights, and we have agreed that every great city eventually contains one species that simply moved in and dared the municipality to raise the matter, and that the municipality, in every jurisdiction, has wisely declined.
Tally, one circuit completed, Arthur consulted, the heron’s audit ongoing, one immigration policy delivered in wellington-boot format. The parakeets adjourned at eight for destinations unminuted. They will reconvene at six tomorrow. They are now, love. Session closed.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk