that time. You won’t regret it.
How to Tell the Difference between . . .
Swallows, Swifts and House Martins
One of the perennial problems at this time of year is figuring out whether the bird that just flew overhead at the speed of light was a swallow, a swift or a house martin. But fortunately, whilst these birds are all superficially similar, there are a range of differences between them that can make telling these three bird species apart reasonably simple, once you know what to look for.
Swallows
Swallows are most easily identified by their red chin and the longer feathers on either side of the tail, which stick out like streamers and make them easy to spot in flight.
Swifts
Swifts are one of the most amazing birds, barely ever coming to ground to rest except to nest and spending virtually their whole life on the wing. High pitched screeching and curved, sickle-shaped wings, together with a short tail, help to identify this species, which can often be seen on warm summer days performing acrobatics in the sky as they hunt for their insect prey.
House Martins
The house martin is probably the smallest of these three species and has a gently curved tail, unlike the squarer tail of the swift or the ‘streamers’ of the swallow. They are most easily identified, however, by their white rump, which can often be clearly seen even from some distance as these birds fly past.
Oysteropolis
Michael Smith
The first inkling of excitement comes on the platform, into the open air, away from the hectic, crowded claustrophobia of the Victorian station and its labyrinthine underground tunnels; there seems to be a note of ozone, a blustery coastal freshness in the air already, cutting through the sticky city heat.
The train gently picks up speed as it glides across the wide sweep of the Thames, the fairy lights on the Albert Bridge a pearl necklace on the grand old dame; past the back of Battersea Power Station, South London, the unfamiliar half, rolls by, 5,000 terraced streets becoming steadily more suburban, gardens and commons getting the upper hand, the city eventually giving way to lush Kentish green, a green so fertile and enchanting that London, as always, has instantly left me, and I am alone in a present-tense romance with the stuff. Kentish countryside seems somehow unlike other English countryside. It’s more like the green of France. It’s hard to pin down why. It’s like the fairytale French countryside of summer holidays, of childhood and youth.
An hour later the green gives way to luminous blue, and then it’s my stop. Stepping back onto familiar ground, walking down the terraced hill to the sea, though the sea here is not quite yet the sea: this seaside is ambiguous, it’s almost the shoreline of the Thames still, it’s marine and estuarine at the same time. The north bank of Essex is just visible twenty miles away on the far horizon. You are always aware that this is the end of the Thames, and by association the Smoke. Looking inland, you see all the electricity pylons marching off to a smokestacked horizon. The train rumbles past along the same vector of communication and joined-upness, all the way back to the great scabby tit of mother London this Kentish suckling depends upon. It feels like London’s last outpost, my bolthole, at this place where the leviathan finally loses out to the vastness of the sea, the vastness of the marine sky, the vasty blue world beyond.
Walking along the shoreline in the pearly evening light, the room above the tennis courts full of stoner kids rehearsing their floydy tunes, wah-wah guitars and jazzy drums floating out of the window which is open to the sea and the balmy summer evening breeze, the best rehearsal room in the world . . . past the weatherboarded white pub stuck out on its own on the beach, with old white-haired ponytailed geezers and Floyd proper on the jukebox – there’s just something about seaside towns and stoners, I guess . . .
An old dear on a fold-out beach chair painting the sea view; all the workaday problems you circle round and round, that blinker you and bind you to your worries and routines, are slowly shed, out here before the wide open sky, the magnificent distance of the far horizon . . .
I didn’t mind that I’d followed the warm, beckoning smell of frying cod batter down the winding alleys, but missed the best chippy by a whisker; I didn’t mind that the other chippy’s gear was sloppy and not up to scratch; I didn’t even mind that Whitstable had been invaded by swarms of little bugs that got into the hairs on my arms and up my nose every few seconds: here I was, back in my coastal Kentish paradise.
Beyond the ramshackle fishermen’s cottages, half a million quid in their battered, black-tarred weatherboard, every Londoner’s wank fantasy of a seaside escape, is the real working harbour, where I always end up having a sit and a stare: an ugly corrugated iron silo, sheds, bright yellow diggers piling into huge mounds of sand and gravel waiting to be shipped off somewhere else. It is here, sitting in my own secret quiet spot on the dock, staring at these piles of aggregates, that my soul finally finds its rest, poised between a man’s need for bloke stuff and the memories of the child and the moody adolescent who is father to the man; this industrial dock is the essence of my early memories, growing up as I did in a dirty northern port, round the corner from corrugated sheds and piles of aggregates like these, which I would wander round as a teenager, spending long, lonely walks searching for myself, whoever that is . . .
The white seagulls sitting on the mounds of gravel have given me back the place I grew up in; though where I grew up is 400 miles away, whipped by the cold winds of the North Sea, it is the same place: the sun sets behind the same bend in the bay, above the same mysterious twinkling pinprick lights; you still yearn to know what life is producing those pinprick lights; the atmosphere of seascape and shoreline haunts you, just the same.
The navy blue sea tractor with the wheels bigger and wider than me reverses, with its bright orange lifeboat on the trailer, the whole ensemble the basic block colours of a lifesize Playmobil toy; its amber light flashes round and round, illuminating specks of spitting rain, and I wander on into the violet hour, alone with my thoughts and the vast sky, the pinpricks of Essex towns twinkling along the far horizon, my thoughts turning to hot chocolate and the candlelit cosiness of the hut.
You are always woken up by the early morning light and the ping of golf balls from the course behind the hut, the retirees rising early and filling up their days with the calmer pleasures . . . the first half hour waking up follows a familiar ritual: set a coffee pot up on the stove, hook the doors open, fold out a beach chair and survey the sea and sky. The strange thing about this seascape is it looks equally fascinating in good or bad weather, and all the weather in between. It is often in between, never quite making its mind up, and I can lose whole days watching the changes of the sky and sea, the many mood swings of this temperamental estuary god.
I say good morning to my lesbian neighbours. Half of them are lesbians on my stretch; the seaside is a site for sexual liberty, just as it always was. It was also the site of the first flush of romance between me and the missus – this little bit of coast is part of us and our story, it played the role of midwife in our early romance. She brought me to a similar hut a few doors down on date number three; there were storms all weekend, and you couldn’t go outside without getting drenched – we didn’t, all weekend, and it was heaven . . . when I told this story to my granny she chuckled with a cheeky glint in her eye and said, ‘Aah, memories! Eh, son?’
When
