Five Migrating Cuckoos

No one knows for sure yet, but it looks as if the five male cuckoos tagged in South-East England by the British Trust for Ornithology, are now in their winter quarters. Just after the December solstice all five were transmitting from West Central Africa in, or around, the Congo Basin.

Each cuckoo's journey was unique. Their departure dates were weeks apart as were arrival dates. Two birds chose westerly flight paths, through Spain and along the coast of North-West Africa, before continuing in a south-easterly direction on the final legs. The other three chose more direct routes, through Italy, across the Mediterranean into North Africa, then across the Sahara. Each journey was punctuated by stopovers of several weeks, at the end of flights which could well have been gruelling, covering up to 2200 Km over a two day period.

It is amazing that all five birds should reach their destination without mishap, and that five birds with breeding grounds around the same area should find themselves close together after having been separated by up to 3600 Km. I used to think that bird behaviour was governed entirely by instinct and that instinct was a property of the species followed blindly by each individual. Free will was not something I associated with birds.

It is hard to imagine such a journey being made without knowledge, at least knowledge, conscious or unconscious, of the destination. I suspect each bird also has knowledge of the hazardous regions to be crossed. It avoids very long flights over the sea, and rests and refuels before attempting a desert crossing. This knowledge cannot have been acquired through learning because the cuckoo's surrogate parents know nothing of migration to another continent. It is possible that this knowledge is resident in the bird brain having been put there through reactions initiated by cuckoo DNA. It is also possible that that the knowledge is resident elsewhere, and cuckoo DNA initiates reactions that result in the cuckoo being able to access it at the appropriate time.

Fascinating!

Saw Therapy

As Christmas approaches I protect myself from paralysis by cliche by - weather permitting - daily saw therapy. The smaller branches that were attached to the huge limb, torn off one of our beech trees in last May's storm, are gradually being reduced to firewood. Beech makes an excellent fuel. The fine twigs are ideal for kindling and the logs, laid on a single layer of coal, blaze brightly before being reduced to a soft, fine ash that fertilizes.

Saw therapy only works if you use a manual implement. Men, the main sawers in this area, prefer power saws. Their whining and groaning (the saws', not the men's) is to my mind devils' music that overpowers and replaces the comforting rhythm of old-fashioned sawing.

The therapeutic effects are not confined to rhythm. I have reprieved pieces of wood from being burned because of the subtle beauty of their bark. Among them were long digits whose skin gleamed with the pink of newly minted copper or the orange tint of copper alloy. They were adorned at intervals with finely-ridged metallic bands and marked with patches of silver grey containing dark microflecks and microstreaks. they had dark lenticel pores in the centre of tiny goosepimples, or small raised rhombuses, or between two tiny lips.

No two pieces of wood are the same. For me, humble beech wood rescues me from pre-Christmas boredom and is a symbol of the unlimited possibilities in Creation.

Santa

Junk mail pushed through the letterbox this morning announced that, for £5 it would be possible to visit Santa's Grotto. Mercenary people would appoint someone wearing a red costume with a large buckle, black boots and a white beard to dispense mass-produced toys to children of this area.

When I was a child Santa Claus was a magical figure. Part of the magic was that he travelled on his reindeer-drawn sleigh to bring presents to children on only one day of the year, Christmas Eve. The rest of the time he spent in his igloo in the North Pole making toys for all the children of the world. This Santa made toys for children because he loved them. He only came down the chimney when they were asleep; so they never saw him. They had to imagine what he looked like. Then someone produced Christmas cards with the vulgar image of the Santa with which we are all familiar and that was the beginning of the end of the magic.

The Student Prince

I might have been ten, perhaps younger, when I was swept off my feet by The Student Prince. For many years afterwards I believed that, once I had shed my cygnet’s drab feathers and become a swan, I would be spirited away to a magical place called Heidelberg where a prince with the handsome dark looks of Edmund Purdom and the powerful, passionate yet tender voice of Mario Lanza would see me and instantly fall in love. It was a successful, if not the only, attempt by the Spirit of Romantic Love to get me to do its bidding.

As a teenager I was attracted more to classical music than to pop. Music of all sorts, I am now convinced, powerfully links the physical and the spirit worlds. Performing music, listening to music not only arouses transient emotions but can alter the course of a life because it is spirit which motivates and energises. In thrall to the Spirit of Romantic Love, you can become blind to the charms of mere mortals. Even worse, you can convince yourself that a mere mortal is The Student Prince and burden him with unrealistic expectations.

Last week I was speaking to a young relative and was struck by how his life seems to be following a similar trajectory to the one mine followed for a couple of decades. As well as sharing genes, classical music, its performance and audition, played a part in both our lives.

We belong to a culture where we listen to music because we enjoy it. We are aware of emotions it may arouse, but our society is still blind to other, perhaps far-reaching consequences, it may have. It can affect our breathing rhythm and heart physiology. Because heart signals radiate some distance from our bodies they can be replicated in those around us causing entrainment which is driven, for better or worse, by the most powerful force in the system.

I am certain that knowledge of the effects of music exists in the human race. Perhaps the knowledge will be shared with the rest of us when the time is appropriate. At least this is my hope. 

In Other Orbits

I am sitting on our three-seater sofa with one cat energetically grooming himself on my right and the other carrying out an identical process on the left. Soon white fur will gleam, charcoal and tan parts will look sleek with mats removed and claws will be carefully bitten trim. I have even seen Sherpa engaged outdoors in what appeared to me to be a teeth cleaning exercise using fine twigs broken off shrubs as a toothbrush. Cat dignity depends on effort being put into personal grooming and to urination and defecation rituals which ensure that waste is hygienically disposed of. What is strange about cats is how little effort is put into cleaning bedding and resting places. When these start to look grubby the cat simply moves on finding somewhere more salubrious to lie while its human friend does the laundry. Cats could learn to flick debris and brush hairs off their sheets couldn’t they? And remove wrinkles to make their bed more comfortable if they really tried. They watch humans doing these things just as they watch everything we do, but no matter how much time they have shared with us, it doesn’t seem to occur to them to imitate us.

Sitting on the sofa, I imagine cat genes launching cats at appropriate times into permitted orbits of behaviour. Those first orbits allow feeding and movement, but soon kittens come under the influence of the Hunting Planet and the varied play, which so fascinates us, begins. The Star of Knowledge has many planets which reflect its light and, throughout their lives, cats slip effortlessly between them. The Warrior governs defence of territory. The Protector teaches them to avoid danger, food poisoning and parasites and seek therapy through eating grass. The Lust and Love Planet has as its domain friendship, courtship, mating and care of the young.

There are however things which the Star of Knowledge cannot teach a cat.

Sandwiches

What for me was an insight woke me in the middle of the night. Before I went to sleep I had read a short piece from Tahir Shah’s new book Travels With Myself. It was called The Magic of the Ordinary, where, in writing with the qualities of a recorded daydream, a scruffy stranger tells Tahir that to understand the extraordinary you must first learn to appreciate ordinariness.

At three or four in the morning I found myself thinking about sandwiches, bought from a bakery at the end of over five, sometimes wet and windswept, hours exploring the city of Derry with my friend Karole. The bakery was near the bus station and round the corner from a pub called Sandinos, which doesn’t sell food but very generously told us where we might find some to eat with a creamy half Guinness and a cup of coffee.

Through the darkness of my bedroom I saw rays from the past, present and future converge on the soft, fresh bread that enveloped the fillings. Some originated from the time when our human ancestors began to cultivate grain, others from when they learned to use fire to cook. Closer to the sandwich were the people who extracted and refined metals to build ovens. The rays anastomosed and rebranched like ivy climbing a tree. Connected to the bread were mills and power plants, ports, salt mines and tarred roads, water reservoirs, money and people picking cotton. I could have followed a ray where yeast, seen with the aid of a microscope, appeared as individual ovoid cells, budding while gas oozed out; or been taken on a tour where the details of anaerobic respiration were explained. It didn’t seem outrageous to imagine that the number of connections surrouning the sandwich might approach infinity. What was certain was that there was much more to ordinariness than meets the eye.

I heartily recommend Travels With Myself to anyone reading this blog. It entertains, but is much more than entertainment. As is written on the back cover, ‘all the pieces in this book are designed to spark the imagination and to act as a catalyst for thought.

Travels With Myself is available now from Lulu.com and can be bought through Amazon in about six weeks’ time.

Nomad

The night before last we watched on television an actor discovering the origin of his nomadic spirit in the grandfather who deserted his grandmother within days of his mother's birth. This maternal grandfather was a member of a well-known family of travelling showmen. I suspected that spirits ran in families. This programme lent support to the idea.

I haven't heard that spirits, like the hunting instinct or the one to protect territory, have been located in the human genome Perhaps there is a parallel form of inheritance which allows them to be passed down through generations, not only in humans but in other animals.

In our part of the world where land is considered the property of individuals and large mammals are constrained within human territories, any nomadic instinct our four-footed associates might have is well and truly crushed. It's different in parts of Africa through which wildebeest and elephants can freely migrate.

Instincts may, or may not, be passed on through the DNA, but it is interesting to use the gene metaphor and think of territorial and nomadic instincts as alleles. The territorial instinct is the dominant allele (at least in the developed world.) The recessive nomadic allele is most likely to survive when copies are inherited from both parents.

There is another possibility. Instincts, as fire spirits, when frustrated by conditions in the material world, can shape-shift into other forms. The travelling showman can become a wandering dervish.

Night Life

Yesterday I wrote to a friend that the place where I live doesn't have a very exciting night life, especially during the week. I don't miss having the sort of night life I had in mind when I wrote that because, cuddled up beside John I can have a fantastic night life ... dreaming.

End of the Marching Season

We are nearing the end of the Marching Season. Music can arouse, or more rarely calm, spirits. This is something to which we give very little thought in the so-called developed world. I suspect our use of music excites some spirits at the expense of others. Marching bands usually play what excites territorial spirits. Pop music concentrates on the spirits connected with romantic love or their more earthy counterparts. Not exactly a spirit balance, I suggest.

Portballantrae

One evening, several years ago, Catriona and I went for a walk along the strand at Portballantrae. It was dusk when, on our way back, we approached the footbridge that crosses the River Bush where it flows into the sea. Catriona, who can hear high-frequency sounds to which I am oblivious, stopped suddenly. It wasn’t long before we both saw what she had heard — a huge colony of hundreds of bats. We stood, mesmirised, while they circled overhead before disappearing as mysteriously as they had come.

I accepted there was no chance of seeing bats when I went with John to Portballantrae a few days ago. The tide was out. There was only a trickle of water in the stream that flows through grey stones and then sand; so we continued across it to the end of the beach where we found a path through mature dunes. Soon we came to the narrow guage railway that connects Bushmills to the Giant’s Causeway, and we were almost at the terminus. There is a cycle path close to the track and weaving across it. We followed it back. Unkempt ground lay beyond the fence on our left. Closer to us were harebells, the occasional burdock plant covered with burrs and snails among marram grass; but diversity disappeared when we came to the golf course. We returned to the car park, bought sandwiches and coffee at the supermarket and sat beside a circular metal table.

It was only then that I noticed nearby a building with a slanted roof that was covered with plants. There were long strands of hay-coloured grass at one edge, but most of the roof was covered with a low reddish plant, possibly a species of sedum. I have heard of green roofs, but this is the first I have seen and, unlike John, I felt excited.

He thinks I have become obsessed by Jinn. That, however, does not stop me saying that, where you find a rare green roof, there must be a guardian jinn.

Two Magpies and a Demon

Magpies, unlike cats, are not finicky eaters and consume with relish the food Banjo and Sherpa reject and which I am unable to spice up for human consumption (usually by me). From unseen vantage points our resident pair watch me as I carry it out and scatter it on the grass. I have hardly time to return to the kitchen before they descend gradually like black and white long-tailed aircraft, skim over the ground, land and hop the short distance towards the food. Until recently Banjo showed no interest in what remained uneaten on his saucer.

It was therefore with great surprise that I saw him one day recently walk over the short grass and moss to where I had scattered the food. With disbelief I watched his jaws moving for a short time before they closed. The magpies landed, first the male who strutted towards pieces of food farthest from the cat. Both came to pick up meat, fly off with it and return for more. As the food disappeared, Banjo moved to position himself crouching, his tail sweeping widely from side to side, close to a tasty morsel. One by one the pieces were lifted into the air until there was only left — the one closest to Banjo. When a magpie came to claim it, Banjo pounced and the bird retreated. I watched fascinated the male magpie’s repeatedly unsuccessful determination to capture the morsel, but didn’t see how the drama ended because the stalemate ended while I went upstairs to tell John.

The following evening we had a repeat performance when John joined me at the kitchen window. What we saw Banjo do is not in the repertoire of a typical cat. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m sure this behaviour is unique to our male cat. What is going on in his mind is open to speculation, but it looks to me as if Banjo, the animal who enjoys teasing me, intended to deceive the magpies. He forced himself to eat distasteful food knowing that they were watching him, and to give them the impression that he intended to eat it all.

Deception is something we associate with humans, but it has its origins in the animal world especially among primates. In his book Born Liars Ian Leslie tells how creativity in humans shares the capacity which allows us to deceive. Before we learn to use language we practise deception; but it is not until we are around four years of age that we realise the enormous potential for getting ourselves out of trouble and furthering our own interests that lies in lying speech. Telling a deliberate untruth requires the knowledge that others can think differently from ourselves. It also depends on memory and imagination. However the illusion that lying is the answer to our problems does not last long. Within a few years we discover that, if we tell too many lies, we lose credibility with those among whom we live. Maintaining this sort of fiction costs energy, induces anxiety and restricts our ability to be truly creative.

Our human development does not end when we see that telling the truth is generally preferable to lying, because the ability to deceive others makes us vulnerable to the innumerable deceptions in which the human race, often unwittingly engages.

There is an alternative explanation of the cause of lying. An ancient legend attributes it to Sut, consummate liar and father of lies. He is a fire spirit, son of Iblis who is better known to Westerners as the Satan who tempted Adam and Eve and was responsible for their banishment from the garden of Eden. Of couse this story is not to be taken literally.

I see a ladder with non-verbal deception as its base, divine creativity at the top and many rungs in between.

Maelstrom

I saw no icebergs while I was in Norway in my early twenties. After a long train journey from Trondheim to Bodo, struggling to keep awake so as not to miss incomparable scenery — fjords, mountain peaks, farms where hay was strung between lines to dry and apples ripened in large orchards — I caught the coastal steamer, the Hurtigrute, to Torsken on the island of Senja. There I joined volunteers from Norway and other parts of Western Europe. For six weeks we camped in the local school. The girls slept in one classroom, the boys in another and we gathered around a long table in a third to eat. The local people supplied us with food — fresh cod from the fjord, whale steaks, sweet, golden goat’s cheese for which we gradually acquired a taste as we developed the skill to slice it razor-thin with an osthovel. Once our Norwegian volunteer cook made pancakes and assembled them with fruit and cream into a delicious gateau, and one afternoon, towards the end of our stay, we were invited into a local house for a feast of cakes and pastries. In return for this hospitality we went with picks and shovels to a stony field close to the wooden church. We repaired the stone wall surrounding it and levelled the ground, turning it into an embryonic park.

July and early August were exceptionally fine that year, but the mountain peak visible from the school was white. I argued that it was made from marble even as we climbed through fragrant shrub to reach snow. Torsken was 69°N, well beyond the Arctic circle which I crossed in the train. From the deck of the Hurtigrute, on the way home, I watched the sun at midnight, still above the horizon.

The people on that remote island had welcomed a youth camp, mainly because it was an opportunity to meet people from other cultures. I suspect we did not live up to their expectations. There was a language barrier, and, unwittingly, with youthful heedlessness, we formed a group that usually excluded them. No doubt we considered ourselves superior to fishermen and their families because we had received more education; and so an opportunity was lost.

Yesterday victims of Anders Brevik, who killed over seventy people in a bomb attack in Oslo and a nightmarish shooting spree on a nearby island, were buried. He claimed to be the defender of a Norwegian way of life, yet, according to the Independent, he despised the farmers among whom he recently lived, considering them unrefined. Tanned and using bodybuilding to make him appear like a God, he considered himself the saviour of Europe. What an Ego!

It seems that Anders Brevik is not the head of a Crusader army. There is no iceberg of which he is the visible tip; but, what he seems to have done is concentrate some of the thoughts about the power of individuals, that swirl like a maelstrom around our western world, while failing to balance them with thoughts centred on responsibility to others.

There are, course, other icebergs floating in our waters.

Free Spirits

The cuckoo comes in April,

He sings his song in May,

In leafy June

he changes tune,

In July he flies away.

True?

This year I was walking in the garden when I heard a single, unmistabable ‘cuckoo.’

Collared doves, which sing, ‘Cuckoo coo,’ nest in the conifers, and wood pigeons with their, ‘cuckoo coo cuckoo,’ come for beech nuts; but ‘cuckoo’ is a rare sound these days. I was so surprised I forgot to note when I heard it. It was probably May.

The British Trust for Ornithology managed to trap five cuckoos in East Anglia, and release them with solar-powered tracking devices on their backs. They were amazed to find that the bird they called Clement left for France on 6th June. Two other birds left in the middle of June and one at the end of the month. The fifth bird, Lyster, is still making short forays around his English base in the middle of July. Far from there being an internal cuckoo clock that strikes sometime in July to say, ‘Go,’ the male cuckoos seem to please themselves.

I was brought up to believe that birds don’t have intelligence. They have instincts which they follow mindlessly.

As there is no fixed time for the departure of the cuckoo, there is no fixed route. Clement spent up to a month in wooded regions in France before flying quickly through Spain, across the Mediterranean and into Algeria. He is now over the Sahara on the Algerian-Mauritanian border.

The other three migratory birds flew in a general southeasterly direction. Martin, like Clement, flew to France before continuing to Northern Italy. Chris spent at least a week in the Netherlands, then travelled to Italy through the Moselle region of France. He was last seen in the Po Delta World Heritage Site.

Kasper is the bird who, so far, has shown most stamina. He flew from England to Antwerp, crossed the Alps in eastern Switzerland and was detected on the outskirts of Rome. Then he travelled 1,367 miles SSW to Algeria. He, like Clement, is now in the Sahara.

You have to admire the courage and adaptability of these irresponsible globetrotters. They seem to be truly free spirits until you realise how vulnerable they are. They seem unable to escape the fate that decrees they lay their eggs in the nests of a limited number of not impassive host species. Cuckoos don’t appear to have the option of exercising creativity building nests or inventing more complex songs; and they don’t experience the parental satisfactions of pair bonding, egg incubation and watching fledglings learn to fly.

Still, those of us who visit the BTO website will be keeping our fingers crossed that Clement, Kasper and the others will safely cross the Sahara. We are interested in finding out their final destinations, how they will spend our winter, when they will decide to start next year’s flight north and whether they will choose a different route. No doubt more surprises are in store.

The Red Lantern

‘The Last Storytellers’ is a book that puts into print stories from the Moroccan tradition of oral storytelling, which goes back almost a thousand years and is now in danger of extinction. Accompanied by his guide, Ahmed, Richard Hamilton sought out in Marrakech five authentic storytellers, who are no longer young but have no-one waiting to don their djellabas. Typically, they are men who followed what they saw as their fate, in spite of the disapproval of orthodox Islam and opposition from families who regarded storytelling as little better than begging.

These storytellers may be aged, poor and frail, but their stories are rich in detail and full of vitality. The first story in the collection was told by Moulay Mohamed who, with a heart condition, is now too weak to tell stories in public. It tells of a poor, lowly sweet seller who leaves Marrakech, crosses the Atlas Mountains and travels through the desert in the hope of finding success. He stumbles across a great city in a lush valley, whose incredibly wealthy Pasha offers him hospitality. When it is time to leave, the sweet seller hesitantly offers his host the only thing he has in his possession, a lantern made of tin and red glass. Although the Pasha’s treasury is full of gold and jewels, he has never seen a red lantern before, is delighted with the gift and gives the sweet seller twelve loads of gold and jewels in return. Back in Marrakech, where he now lives in a magnificent mansion, the former sweet seller receives a visit from the wealthy brother who showed him no compassion during his unsuccessful years. This man learns the source of his brother’s fortune and sets out on a similar journey ... but I won’t give the ending away.

To me this story is a reminder that outward observances do not bring the desired results if there is something amiss in the heart. Imitation is a jinn we share with at least some of our primate relatives. It’s the jinn that makes us want what everybody else has and do what everybody else does; but our mirror neurons also allow us to exercise empathy and a purer spirit — compassion.

This Sunday morning, when ‘The News of the World’ carries its farewell montage of famous front pages, I was looking at a different photo montage, one constructed by Omran Sahar. It is made up of five photos, four from the drought stricken Horn of Africa. They show underfed children whose eyes plead for food. The fifth photo shows, against a golden background a prosperous-looking Arab man dressed in western clothes.

Ruins of my Past and Present

There were few things our father enjoyed more than discovering relics from the past. At a time when progress was all that mattered, he brought us to see the humble reminders that our physical occupation of a place is limited by time.

What we were brought to see was within walking distance or a very short drive by car from home. There were a couple of abandoned mills which no longer ground corn, but had dams with plant-covered walls up which we loved to scramble. There were mill races and mill wheels which no longer turned. These were from the recent past.

Three churches in ruins stand within a couple of miles’ radius of the town. The nearest had a carving in stone of The Crucifixion thought to date from the tenth century. It was built on the site of an ancient monastery. Another stands atop a hill. The third, Killylagh Old Church, is not far from a small loch, on a narrow road leading to the foot of a mountain called Carntogher.

When we climbed the Carn we followed a stony path and our father told us we were on the road used by stage coaches when they travelled between Belfast and Derry. Our town was half way between the two cities and had an inn where travellers could spend the night and where horses could be stabled and fed.

I have a hunch that the road taken by the stage coach followed a more ancient route. Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but close to it are other places we visited. The strangest of these is the Sweat House where people sat around a fire in a cabin before jumping into a well nearby. More mysterious are the earthen ring fort and the dolmen.

Since our father’s death people have come to me looking for information about the things that interested him; and I have found it hard to convince them that I am a different person with my own interests. Now I find my husband is fascinated by local history and I am being pulled back to my youth and the things I saw and was told.

Remembering and uncovering the past is a powerful animal instinct, an important part of the animal survival kit. Cats learn from previous experience, remember where potential prey is to be found, know that a fox or another cat has been visiting by the scent it left. Adapted by human creativity, the instinct shape shifts into a variety of forms. It would not surprise me if the same local history jinn which possessed my father, was alive and well and haunting my husband’s computer room.

Savage Pleasure

I only realised that hunting is an animal instinct deep in the human race when I read Thomas Harris’ ‘The Silence of the Lambs.’ Hunting driven by pleasure is a theme of the book.

Many people disapprove of cat behaviour. Cats are not only superb hunters, but they are perceived to enjoy hunting, to take pleasure in the chase. As kittens, and less frequently as adults, they enjoy playing games which hone their hunting skills, games that we as children whose play was rarely supervised by adults, also played. Hide-and-seek and tig sometimes require a player to act as predator, sometimes as prey. In a situation where it is understood that the prey is not in real danger there is also pleasure in being preyed upon. Why else, as young children, would we, to our shame, have taunted an old man to come and catch us, as we stood at a safe distance ready to disappear through the open door of an outhouse when he responded? Now our male cat taunts me by audibly sharpening his claws on a carpet I value more than others, ready to run when I appear to chase him.

Long before we left primary school we became bored with these childhood games. The boys turned to Cowboys and Indians as a form of play hunting, and I assumed that hunting was something other people did. Sportsmen on horseback hunt foxes with hounds and many of us regard this as a cruel sport. Police forces hunt criminals and those whom the state considers enemies; but, when we hunt for a mate, a house, a bargain, treasure, we’re not really hunting, are we?

‘Problem-solving is hunting, it is savage pleasure and we are born to it,’ wrote Thomas Harris. These words made me interrupt my reading of this gripping book, showing me myself and others (including animals) in a new light.

May Storm

On the last Monday of May, unusually for this time of year, there was a storm. Our three massive beech trees became giant seaweeds swaying in the current. Watching from a window I saw a stream of leafy broken twigs flowing at eye level from south to north. A voice on the radio repeatedly interrupted the scheduled programme to tell of roads all over the country blocked by fallen trees; but it was mid-afternoon before a great limb was torn from one of our beech trees, the tree on which W. Moore had carved his name in 1914, probably before he set off to fight in the Great War realising he might never return.

The bulk of the torn limb was taken away by the men who cleared the road. Beech is a hardwood the colour of dried pasta. I can think of no reason why it cannot be turned into beautiful furniture, but the fate of this beech branch is to be sawn into logs and burned. Meanwhile we import shesham wood furniture from India where carpentry skills have not died out. The price of oil and other fuels has been steadily increasing, so it is not surprising that the largest remaining chunks of wood also disappeared. That left a heap of unwanted branches blocking the footpath.

One day last week John and I started to dismantle the pile disdained by power-saw owners. We threw, heaved, pulled and dragged branches back into our own territory, returning the next day to continue the work. Using muscle power I sawed up a few of the smaller, shorter branches and burned them for comfort during these June evenings when the temperature can drop, untypically, to a few degrees above zero.

Two long pasta-coloured gashes mark the places where the limb became detached from the tree. What should we do next? The beeches may be coming to the end of their lives. John has just found a google map showing how mature trees lined this road in 1860. The lifespan of a beech is reckoned to be between 150 and 200 years, but it may survive up to 300 years.

The people who planted the trees thought ahead. Future generations would enjoy their beauty, their nuts would provide food for birds, their branches fuel for people, their timber could be shaped into chairs or staircases or parquet floors. But it was not to work out that way. Trees are now not a resource but a financial liability to their owners. A day’s work by a tree surgeon could cost the equivalent of a year’s minimum wage.

I see a very large jinn called the Free Market striding the Earth, determining what we eat, how we keep ourselves warm, what we wear, how we earn our living. With a cup of coffee beside me, I am aware of the benefits it has brought, but also of the way the straitjacket has been steadily tightening.

Freetown John

I was not aware of the existence of John O’Neill Walsh, of Freetown Sierra Leone and Magherafelt Ireland, until my husband returned from the Public Records Office and said he had found his will. John, the brother of one of my ancestors, died in Freetown in 1822. Among his possessions were a table, ten wine glasses and books.

Freetown John can’t have been an old man when he died: he bequeathed property to aunts. What was he doing in Sierra Leone? Husband John suggested he was in the British navy or army, but we soon discounted that. Perhaps he was a trader?

By coincidence I happened to read ‘Ox Travels’ a recently published collection of stories by thirty-six travel writers who have donated all their royalties to Oxfam. I was surprised to find two pieces were set in Sierra Leone. Aminatta Forna recalled being entertained by a street performer while she waited at Hastings Airport; but it was Tim Butcher’s story, ‘Letting Greene go’ that provided a sketch of the city and beamed a light on its past.

Thirty years before John O’Neill Walsh died some of the first slaves to be freed gathered to have a service of thanksgiving under the massive cotton tree which still stands in Siaka Stevens Street. While he lived conscience-stricken Britain had its navy scour the ocean for ships of less enlightened nations which still transported slaves. The navy’s aim was to rescue them and resettle them in Sierra Leone. By 1827, five years after his death, Fourah Bay College, the oldest university in colonial Africa, had been founded as an Anglican Missionary School and Freetown was on its way to becoming ‘The Athens of Africa.’ Perhaps John, with his books, emphasising his Irishness with his middle name, taught in a school which provided more elementary education.

Even if you don’t have family connections with Sierra Leone, I heartily recommend you read ‘Ox Travels’. Nicholas Shakespeare’s account of his journey to Benin with his sister and Brazilian brother-in-law in search of the former street boy’s ancestors is an appetite-whetting starter for a varied feast. Peter Godwin finds himself in grave danger in his native Zimbabwe when he is brought to a secret diamond mine; Ruth Padel’s Burma has people who turn into tigers at night; a veteran matador allows Jason Webster discover the symbolism in bullfighting; Rory Stewart describes the creation of the Turquoise Mountain project in a threatened section of medieval Kabul. These are only a few of the stories which come to mind as I write this.

If ‘Ox Travels’ was published before John O’Neill Walsh embarked on his journey to Sierra Leone, I’m sure he would have put it in his trunk.

Lingering Thoughts

There is an assumption in our culture that unspoken and unwritten thoughts simply disappear. We have no evidence that they survive, but neither have we evidence that they vanish, violating the law of conservation of a still unknown mass or energy.

Three places make me favour the hypothesis that thoughts do not degrade as rapidly as we ... think.

The first place is a Breast Care Centre where I have a yearly appointment. It is a place in the basement of a hospital where many women who have experienced breast cancer wait to see a surgeon, or an oncologist, or to have a mammogram. Before I go I take the precaution of applying underarm antiperspirant but, long before I am seen by an expert, my clothes are damp from the sweat of fear. Yet, during the year following my diagnosis I managed to live five days a week for five weeks in a hostel on the site of the hospital where I was having radiotherapy. This hospital was situated in grounds where mature trees grew, birds made their home and laughter could often be heard. I remember my stay there as a happy one.

Self preservation is an even more basic animal instinct than defence of territory. Confronted by a predator we have the biological equipment to enable us to fight or flee; but it is impossible to vanquish quickly or escape from the predator called cancer. Fear is an emotion designed to galvanise us into action. We feel trapped when we have to spend lengthy periods in a waiting room, haunted by the trapped thoughts electric with emotion of those around us and those who have waited there in the past. There is, I sense, a terrifying jinn in the Breast Care Centre.

The other places are both kitchens with tiled walls and floors, where an unhappy thought seems to pull towards itself previous unhappy thoughts that have been lurking in the walls, waiting for an opportunity to invade what I think of as my mind and to have fun disturbing me until they become exhausted.

Last week I saw a table and chairs in a shop window, fell in love with them and bought them. We badly needed new chairs and our kitchen table had been inherited by my mother. When they were delivered I felt a calmness enter the room. Only then did I realise the significance of the wrought iron in the chair backs. Jinn are deterred by iron and now I can think a single unhappy thought and then let it go, without being plagued for hours by its associates.

Five Claimants

Here are five claimants for the title of Jinn:

Nationalism

Loyalism

Republicanism

Sectarianism

Racism.

Each can be seen as a set of beliefs, but is it really alive? There are many reasons why I think so.

Like humans jinn are born and die, but their lifespans are much longer, frequently lasting hundreds of years; so they survive the death of the humans most closely associated them. Al Quaeda does not cease to exist because Osama bin Laden was assasinated.

Birth assumes a parent and I see the origin of each of my five claimants in a very powerful instinct found in many vertebrates. It is the impulse to find a territory where it is possible to feed and breed, to mark that territory and to defend it against invading members of its own species and other threatening species. Both our cats, male and female, mark and defend territories. The male rubs the side of his head several times against the French door when I open it to let him in. Birds in the garden are constantly delineating their territories by flying around the trees and shrubs which form the boundary and singing on each one. We have walls and fences and title deeds. In each case an individual, or a small related group, claims and defends a territory.

Each of my five proposed jinn lays claim to a superterritory and defends it against individuals and other superterritories. Nationalism, Loyalism and Republicanism are obviously connected to physical territories. Sectarianism is associated with a mental one.

A recent BBC radio programme expressed surprise at the apparently inexplicable behaviour of Northern Ireland teenagers too young to have experienced conflict. These kids are using social-networking sites to promote Sectarianism. The assumption is that, once politicians sign a peace deal, Sectarianism vanishes; but jinn live on. They haunt places and possess people. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to them as ancient genes insist they establish a territory with a view to mating. At fourteen they are in no position to own a car, never mind a house. They can’t even lay claim to an intellectual field.

The presenter of the programme was particularly shocked by the virulance of the language used on the social networking sites; but jinn have emotions similar to ours. It is not surprising that humans possessed by them display hate, fear and envy when marking their virtual territories.

Like humans, jinn marry. In Northern Ireland Nationalism and Republicanism are ofter married to Sectarianism; but the apparently opposed Loyalism is also the spouse of this hairy legged, sharp-clawed one.

Jinn are said to have another formidable capacity. They shape shift. After the Good Friday Agreement, when Nationalism, Loyalism and Rebublicanism were put into bottles, stoppered and flung into the Atlantic Ocean, Sectarianism quietly shape shifted into Racism.

Hooved Feet and Hairy Legs

In my review of And the Bull Kills You I wrote that the detective finds within himself both the bull and the bullfighter, and, in a book which confronts sex and violence, I don't think this is too far fetched. Some of the jinn we have to deal with are connected to our animal instincts. Something compels us and our mammalian relatives to preserve ourselves and our genes.

When I was a teenager there were whispers of a tall dark charming stranger who frequented dance halls and of whom we needed to be very wary. Women had discovered that their dancing partner had cloven hooves. I don't think any of us believed these reports, at least literally. The cloven hooves were a metaphor for the devil, one of the jinn, who preyed on innocent girls to satisfy his animal instincts.

In the story of Solomon and Bilquis, the beautiful Queen of Sheba, it is she who is rumoured to have jinn among her ancestors. Determined to find out if the story is true, Solomon has constructed in his private apartments a glass floor under which fish swim in water. Standing at the other end of the room, Solomon beckons to Bilquis to come to him, making her lift her skirt instinctively to keep it out of the water and allowing him to see her feet and legs. He sees that her feet are not hooved, as people have claimed, but she does have another jinn characteristic, hairy legs. Fortunately this problem is not insurmountable. Solomon has his jinn prepare a hair removing lotion of slaked lime and ash.

Or the Bull Kills You

This is a review I wrote of Jason Webster's first detective novel. It is set in Valencia where the detective, Max Camara finds himself investigating the murder, after a bullfight, of Spain's best loved Matador. Jason Webster recently wrote in his blog that writing for him is a process of discovery, a quest to find his authentic self.

‘Or the Bull Kills You’ is a vivid masculine energising book by a writer unafraid to confront the reality of violent death.

As in any good murder mystery, the identity and motives of the killer (or is it killers?) remain concealed until the end. Chief Inspector Max Camara of the Valencia Cuerpo Nacional de Policia resists the temptation and pressures on him to indict the most obvious suspect. Instead, using the tactics of the bullfight, he gets to know each of the suspects, observes the weaknesses of each, assesses their capacity to torture and kill and predicts their responses before moving in for the final confrontation.

To really appreciate this book you have, like a matador, to be in control and refuse to rush. Then you realise that Camara is not only a detective: he is also a mystery. In parallel with the revelation of the hidden lives of the suspects is the revelation of a side of the detective he has previously refused to acknowledge. Who among us really likes to admit he, or she, is driven by animal instincts? By identifying with the bull, Camara acknowledges he has within him both bull and bullfighter. Using the art of the matador to control the bull within, rather than denying its existence, he learns to benefit from, rather than be at the mercy of, animal vitality.

I suspect this is a book which will be read mostly by men, but for me it was engrossing and I hope that it will find many more readers among women.

Legends of the Fire Spirits

I am intrigued by the idea that cats might be jinn.

Here is a review I wrote of a book about jinn. It is by Robert Lebling with a foreword by Tahir Shah and is called Legends of the Fire Spirits.

How do you write for sceptical westerners about things, beings or forces so subtle they are undetectable by ordinary human senses and, until now, by scientific instruments? Robert Lebling has done just that, undeterred by the risk of incurring ridicule from those of us unwilling to concede that there is much we still do not understand; but who saw Osama bin Laden as the embodiment of evil clashing with good in the form of Barack Obama; and the marriage of Kate Middleton to Prince William as the union of a mortal with a supernatural being.

‘Jinn’ is a word derived from an Arabic root which means to ‘conceal’ or ‘cover with darkness’; but the darkness is not total. The spirits created by God from smokeless fire can take on the features of any living being they desire apart from those of a prophet or imam, but when they interact with humans, who are more dense and made from clay, there is an energy change. Robert Lebling has searched for these energy bursts in pre-Islamic writing, the Koran, the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammed), folktales, history, European literature, the Internet and the writing of maverick scientists. With time and space compressed a picture emerges, fashioned from metaphor and legend.

Although Jinn are physically fundamentally different from familiar living creatures, we see a race similar to us in many ways, sharing our emotions of envy, love, hatred, fear resentment, anger. Some Jinn are helpful to mankind. Others are powerful and malicious. From them humans have found it necessary to devise forms of protection, and not just in Muslim countries. Here in the West people wear blessed medals, bless themselves with holy water and put sprigs of conifer, blessed on Palm Sunday, behind pictures as protection against evil spirits.

It wasn’t until after I started to read this book for the second time that I really appreciated how extraordinary it is. It deserves to be read for several reasons. Besides being entertaining it provides, as Tahir Shah writes in his introduction, ‘a window into Arab and Islamic society that is usually clouded over, opaque to all except Arabists and scholars of Islam.’ By gazing through this window with an open mind we may discover something useful. Spiritual forces, whether we call them Jinn or not, whether they are material entities, a form of electromagnetic radiation, thoughts, or none of these, are complex and inescapable. Robert Lebling concludes that we may never really understand them, but ‘we can understand how they affect us, and how we respond to them and how we interact with each other as we try to deal with them.’