CHERTSEY

BOATS, BRIDGES, BOILERS ... IF IT'S GOT RIVETS, I'M RIVETTED
... feminist, atheist, autistic academic and historic narrowboater ...
Likes snooker, beer, tea, rivets and solitude, and is strangely fascinated by the cinema organ.
And there might be something about railways.
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Wednesday 29 February 2012

Drowning in birdsong

Three times now, on a certain part of the towpath on my way back from the village, I have heard a woodpecker. As I have never seen one, every time I stop, and try to locate where the intermittent sound is coming from - so far without any success, inasmuch as I have still not seen a woodpecker. But when I stopped today, and was looking and listening, I realised just how much birdsong was going on that I simply hadn't noticed. Not just the crows and the pigeons, that could be heard above the throng; not just the songs and chirpings of myriad birds I can't identify, but a veritable wall of sound; a sea of thousands of tiny tweets in which I was completely submerged. And a phrase from James's Boring Things blog post of yesterday came back to me - 'the transformative power of attention' - which to me means the way in which we can change our world just by noticing things.

I never did see the woodpecker though.

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