Fish and Ravens

 People felt cooped up yesterday. It was raining. The rain was particularly wet; not heavy but fine, constant wet rain. The kind of rain that seeps through your waterproofs and settles in your bones. Most people don’t go out in that kind of rain but it’s my favourite. I am a bit of a fish and I’m missing the swimming pool. There’s a peace to being out in that kind of weather. Maybe because no one else goes out but I think it’s more than that. There’s no sound to that kind of rain. It’s piterrless. It doesn’t even hiss. 

The birds also love this kind of rain. They chirp more and you are much more likely to have a bird fly out right past your nose in that kind of weather. They also seem to play.

I stood for a while watching two big black birds - crows , probably, or maybe ravens, having a game of tag over the school sports field. One would fly from the tree and a few seconds later the other would try to catch its friend. Twisting, turning flight, back and forth until they touched their shiny black beaks and flew back to the tree to start again. This time the other black bird (the one with the tiny white patch under its wing) went first. Someone will probably tell me that this behaviour was nothing to do with the rain and just a harbinger of Spring. They will say that it wasn’t tag but a sexy dance but I’m certain I would never have seen it if I didn’t like walking in the rain. As I watched them, I thought about the ravens at the Tower of London.

You probably know the superstition but it is said that they are a good omen and six have to live there for the Country to be safe. I don’t know where this superstition comes from but the ravens at the Tower are pets. Their wings are clipped and they are given names. The superstition is taken so seriously that they usually have a spare, so that if a ravens does chose to leave then there will still be six. 

I remember in the eighties, when we were all terrified of nuclear attack, and the government pushed leaflets through our doors explaining how to build a bunker with a kitchen table and two rolls of gaffer tape, Raven George had to be retired to Wales for bad behaviour. I think he was attacking the TV aerials.

Now that we are all battling Covid we have another Corvid worry. I have been watching all the Corvidae birds quite closely for a while. As humans we are superstitious about crows and magpies as well as ravens. They seem to be such intelligent birds. But I think it’s the name similarity that has got to me.

Merlina, one of the Tower Ravens, has gone missing. No one knows what has happened to her but she has left of her own free will. They suspect she has probably died. The other ravens just carried on strutting about in the rain and pondering the question of whether they were in actual fact writing desks (Lewis Carrol put the poor ravens into an existential crisis years ago). The Yeomans didn’t panic because they have a spare but we all know that it’s not a good sign.

Meanwhile, in Parliament, an idiot was suggesting that fish were now happy because they are British. Fish don’t care about the rain but I wouldn’t be at surprised if the ravens all leave, no matter what the weather is like.