The Kitchen Table Talent Award Winners 2012

BEST WRITER: Catherine Bain

Catherine Bain

Come Down to the Harbour by Catherine Bain

So he said, “Come down to the harbour with me at dusk and I’ll show you a sight.”

I live now in the most easterly town in the UK. A town I have already come to love but a town that has largely forgotten its glorious past and has yet to glimpse its prosperous future, so I couldn’t imagine what that sight may be among the traffic, tugs and gas rig building sites in the ropiest part of town.

So I went. I met him on the bascule bridge at 4pm that February afternoon. We stood together peering through the six-foot-high spiky steel railings enclosing the working harbour, the air thick with diesel fumes from fishing boats before us and Friday rush-hour traffic on the bridge behind.

The sun was starting to sink behind the crumbly tall buildings on the waterfront, giving them an undeserved rosy glow and casting pink sky reflections across the oil floating on the surface of the harbour water. It was cold and more than breezy. Moored boats clinked and chinked in the wind, making familiar coastal music.

“Don’t talk,” he said. “Watch out to sea, look up and be patient.” So I waited, freezing.

Suddenly, with a whoosh and a rhythm of beating wings, the first few starlings swooped in close over my head from behind and started to dance in front of me. A second squadron approached quickly from the south, then a third and a fourth from the north. Each arriving bird cloud joined with those already there and melded into the performance. Diving, rising, mixing, separating and growing and growing until the air above us was full of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of starlings, each knowing its place in the shape-shifting spectacle. “It’s called a murmuration,” he said. “It happens every evening in the wintertime.”

A few passers-by looked up, stopped and joined us. Others, heads down, weekend plans on their minds, didn’t notice that anything was happening at all.

Spellbound for long, darkening minutes, we cricked our necks and watched, oblivious to all else but the urban ritual before us.

Just as suddenly as it began, it changed. One last huge coming together, then, on the next descent, one group peeled off to the right, as if to a silent command, and dived under the harbour boardwalk to noisily sort out a night-time roosting agreement. To be followed quickly by a second group and then a third, each dropping out of the main chorus, seemingly randomly choosing port or starboard, and settling to roost. On and on as darkness fell, until the last dozen or so fell from the sky and joined the now invisible and quietening cacophony.


Sources: http://www.allaboutyou.com/