A Place for Pigeons

I’m feeling a bit stuck at the moment. It feels as though we are on the edge of a transition and some are being forced to move through it, while others are being held back. It seems to me that this would be an ideal time to ask yourself what you want next. I think I’ve mentioned before that I have done one of Adrienne’s yoga workouts every day (for over 150 days). I finished the last set of 30 days a while ago and have been letting fate (or the YouTube algorithm) choose the one I need every day. Yesterday, it was a practise about transitions. At the end she said, “I invite you to finish this sentence, ‘I choose....’

I finished the sentence with, “toast!” This makes me think that I’m not ready for any kind of transition, so while the world moves on, gets angry, tears down statues and makes plans, I’m going to stay exactly where I am, with my little routines, eating toast for breakfast and watching the pigeons peck the heads of the squabbling starlings on the bird feeder.

It has taken me a while to love the pigeons. They just seemed to be big, fat, lazy pooping machines that annoyed the dog. However, they’ve grown on me. I’ve been watching them in my garden and they seem to have a grandpa intelligence. There they sit on the fence, in their cardigans, sucking a Werther‘s Original, watching the other birds get het up about everything. I like to think they have come to my garden to retire.

A few years ago, I was in London with my son and while he was having an interview that we are not allowed to talk about I wandered the streets getting upset about statues. I was cross that there were none that represented me. If statues are history then it was a very narrow history that they are telling. As I was wandering, I noticed the pigeons. They seemed to be using the statues for very important meetings. I sat in the park with my notebook and started to write an idea for a story (maybe a children’s picture book) where pigeons were part of the secret service, meeting on statues and keeping the world safe. In some ways, it helped me to be less cross about the statues because they became less about telling a faulty history and more about being places for pigeons to sit.

In my imagination, Fred, the pigeon has retired from his secret service job, where he had meetings on Churchill, decorating him daily with pigeon excrement. Fred has chosen my garden to spend his final years. 

We only have a small garden but it is a constant work-in-progress. We are currently moving things around to make room for a shed/workshop for the Long Suffering Husband. Yesterday, he started to make a new water feature to replace the old one. It’s not going to be very much different because we are going to reuse the materials we had. It will, when it’s finished be a waterfall made from reclaimed ridge tiles. This time he has decided to build a structure to put the tiles on. At the moment I’m not sure how it’s going to work but he is usually a design genius, so it will be fine.

Fred is camera shy

I took one look at it and said, “Next slide please.”

I’ve watched too many coronavirus briefings.

How nice of the LSH to build a waterslide for Fred to use in his retirement.