Murmuration

            The collective nouns that are used for animals reveals a poetic sensibility that can be evocative but can also be downright impolite. If you were a rhinoceros and hanging out with other rhinos would you want to be referred to as ‘a crash of rhinoceroses’? Or if you were a hippopotamus and were gathering with other hippos would ‘a bloat of hippopotamuses’ float your boat? And I think calling a collection of tigers ‘an ambush of tigers’ is just pre-judging them, just expecting them to misbehave. Birds on the whole come out of this a lot better. ‘A parliament of owls’ is suggestive of thoughtfulness and deliberation even if today’s politicians tend to spoil these associations. You couldn’t imagine anything nicer than ‘a charm of goldfinches’ could you? But even with birds the naming of collectives takes on a gothic tilt: ‘a gulp of magpies’; ‘a murder of crows’; ‘an unkindness of ravens’.

             A murmuration of starlings has to be the best way of naming a collection of starlings, and therefore the best collective noun because starlings are really head and shoulders above the rest of us when it comes to being and acting collectively. For anyone who has witnessed a murmuration of starlings coming in to land in some wetlands, or finding a perch on the burnt out remains of a pleasure pier, it is a stunning sight of pulsing, swooping, flitting movement choreographed by thousands and thousands of birds in synchronised formations. The patterns that these starlings make are formless forms: it looks as if they are constantly on the verge of revealing something – a word, or the face of god. Murmuration is as near as you can get to describing the sorts of clustering that starlings make: it doesn’t suggest the visual aspect of their swarming but nails the white-noise impact of their movement, and the crescendos and diminuendos of their gathering. I think we should reserve the word murmuration for starlings, but if we did use it in another context it might be fitting, albeit differently, for actors. Thus ‘a murmuration of extras’ would designate a large group of actors in a restaurant scene, for instance, whose main role is to provide visual noise and the sort of rise and fall of a humming murmur as background to the protagonists’ dialogue.

              According to Chris Pagham – friend to the ordinary animal, scourge to those who sentimentalise cuteness – Britain is steadily losing its starling populations. It turns out that this has nothing much to do with global warming but is linked to global politics; to be precise, to a form of dictatorial state control in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s. It seems that Comrade Stalin was super keen on starlings as a form of natural pest control. He authorised a Union wide programme of environmental encouragement to starlings. When winter froze the ground the starlings migrated, and some of them came to Britain. In the 1940s the winter population of starlings in East Anglia alone was roughly forty million. Now that must have been some spectacle.

Birds’ Milk

I think I was always lactose intolerant, culturally. When I was a kid, full-fat milk (though it was just called milk then) was delivered daily to the front door. Often the little metallic lids of the bottles would have been pecked open by hungry birds. As a child I always thought of milk as “birds’ milk”, as if by piercing the lids the birds now owned the content, but more crucially that they had somehow contaminated the milk with their worm-breath, with their dirty beaks, and with their fanatically deranged pecking. I think that bird-pecked-milk was mainly a winter phenomenon, but I could be wrong. In the summer, especially at weekends, the milk had other reasons for encouraging my disgust: it would have been warming-up in the sunshine for a while before breakfast. If this didn't instantaneously make the milk “go off” I was sure it sent it well on its way.

My mother’s culinary likes and dislikes might have been formed before the Second World War but they were irreversibly stamped by that war. Rationing might have been over by the 1960s and 70s but to my mother wasting food was both sinful and probably an act of treason. Whether it was because of rationing or not she has always been drawn to butter, cream and other fatty, milky products. She would keep a small bowl of brown congealed fat in the fridge. This was the run-off fat from the Sunday roast and would be used for her bread-and-dripping sandwiches. For me it meant that a visit to the fridge was always a fairly queasy experience. She was also a great fan of the “top-of-the-milk” – that thick plug of creamy milk that floated to the top of the milk bottle to produce a stopper made of curd. My mum would want this plug for her cornflakes and it would flop out onto the little flakes followed by a flow of less obviously cheesy milk (now, because she buys thinned, semi-skimmed milk, the plug has disappeared, so she adds actual cream).

During the summer we would always go to Padstow in Cornwall. We always stayed in the same chalet with a view of the dredger endlessly fighting the tidal drifts of mud in the harbour. There were always a few days when we couldn't go to the beach because it was raining, then the choice was either going to town and watch The Sound of Music for the zillionth time, or amuse ourselves in the chalet. My sister and I would play “Crossroads” – it was a game based on pretending we were running the famous, but wholly TV-based, Crossroads motel located on some ring-road near Birmingham. The chalet kitchen had a breakfast bar (endlessly exotic, endlessly glamorous to us) and we used this as the “pass” for our restaurant. I have a feeling that this was a game wholly ruled by my sister. We only served two dishes as far as I can remember: “Banana Bombarder” and “Orange On”. I have no idea of what the bombarder bit of “Banana Bombarder” was (or if that is indeed how you spell this made-up word), but I think “Orange On” consisted of orange squash and milk, and that the coagulated results were both fascinating and extremely repulsive.

Since my childhood milk has got thinner and thinner. The birds don’t peck the morning milk anymore because milk delivery is much less common and when it is delivered it comes in plastic or cardboard containers. We get our milk delivered as little pillows of milk (milk in a bag). I don’t touch it of course: to me it is already contaminated. It is and will always remain birds’ milk.