Shree! Shree! Shree!
Shree! Shree! Shree!
Shree! Shree! Shree!
I glance up from my garden-table breakfast to the source of that piercing racket and see there, on the roof, the baby herring gull. Clearly, it’s hungry.
I am not normally a fan of gulls. In context, at the beach, they’re absolutely fine as they pick their way along the sand, jabbing at a broken razor clam here, a stranded sandeel there, but here on the coast they tend to stray further inland looking for easier pickings, growing fat on discarded chips and sandwich crusts, rifling through bins. Often, they can be so bold as to swoop down from a clear blue sky and steal food right out of our hands, as happened twice in the space of two minutes, to my daughter Elle as she was trying to have a snack while we walked to her scheduled driver’s theory test in Swansea just the other day.
Shree! Shree! Shree!
Eventually, one of the parents clatters down onto the roof and regurgitates a little breakfast, perhaps a stolen pasty or a salvaged sausage roll from the nearby town centre shops, keeping the chick quiet for a matter of seconds before
Shree! Shree! Shree!
It’s no use – there’s absolutely no way I can concentrate on reading with all that noise. I put my book down and watch the avian comings and goings of our rooftop tenants.
“Hi”. Ah, here she comes, sauntering into the garden, the epitome of oblivious elegance draped in that effortless, carefree ease of the young.
“I was just thinking about you.”
“What are you up to?”
“Trying to read.” I point down at the book, then up at the chick, which, as though on cue, begins to pipe up once again.
Shree! Shree! Shree!
“Ugh. That’s annoying. I don’t know how you can stand that,” and just like that, she is off again, likely to chat to her friends through some online platform or another, or to rifle through the fridge for a snack. I turn my attention back to the gull just as another feathered parent stops to make a food drop.
One thing I can’t begrudge those gulls though, I think as I watch them, is their parenting skills. Every summer the rooftops around here are all inhabited by fluffy grey and black puffballs as the gulls hatch out their next brood, and then spend the ensuing weeks flying around, gathering food and attentively feeding the chicks until they are ready to fly the nest. Sometimes, if the earliest attempts at flight go wrong, the chicks will flutter to the ground where they will stroll around bewildered for a day or two until they finally achieve lift-off, the parents watching over them diligently in this vulnerable state, dive-bombing anyone, or anything, that dares come near their offspring.
Shree! Shree! Shree!
Our chick is excitable today, and it’s getting big too. The parents have done a good job this year. As I look up to the roof from my garden vantage point, to where the chick is pacing back and forth, I catch a glimpse of the empty washing line slicing across the sky and a sudden, involuntary flashback catches me off guard. The years peel away until a string of white Babygros, freshly laundered, adorns that line again, flapping and tugging at a breeze from the past.
It seems trite to wonder where the years have gone, and yet all parents eventually ask themselves the same question. ‘Enjoy them now, because they grow up quickly’, people advise. How right they are. It literally feels like yesterday that I was scooting back and forth along the motorway to the hospital where my wife and child lay in their respective beds, so vulnerable, fetching, carrying, washing and drying and flapping all the while about whether I would be any good at parenting. ‘If you wait until you’re ready to be a parent, you’ll never be ready’, is another of those nuggets of advice often handed down. Correct again. I spent at least the first six months of Elle’s life feeling as though someone had snuck up behind me and just deposited a piece of fine china in my arms.
“It’s stopped. Thank God for that!” Elle re-emerges from the house, looking up at the roof.
“So it has.” I watch her again, propelled back into the present as this grown woman strolls unhurriedly over to the garden chair next to me, flumping down onto the seat cushion. I look at her.
“What?! What are you looking at?” she asks, a half-smile playing on her face.
“Oh, nothing” I reply, thinking of recent events – an eighteenth birthday, a passed theory test, A-Level results and university just around the corner.
“You’re strange sometimes” she laughs, turning back to messaging her friends on her phone. Now it is my turn to smile.
Glancing skyward again, I notice the reason for the gull chick’s silence. Finally, it has mastered flight, swooping overhead, prescribing a looping circle over the gardens and the rooftops, looking effortless in the face of this next adventure. There, as always, the diligent parents watch over, following in its trail, never far away.
