A bird's eye view...

‘Why are you taking a picture of the wall?’ She said.

How could I explain that something about the way the wooden birds on the mantelpiece and the flatness of the light coming in through the window had resonated with another something inside me – a memory perhaps?

A Dodo inside a glass case on a sunny day in a dusty house with egg and cress sandwiches on a coach trip to Tring. Was I wearing shorts? I think that I was. The Dodo, all glass eye and beak, looked real enough to me. Stuffed? Well, certainly not alive. A model, fabricated from wax and chicken feathers? It may have been, it probably was, but for me it was a wonder.

A wonder to be wondered at and remembered.

My carved wooden birds aren’t Dodos, as dead as one maybe in their simple carved stillness and rough painted semblance, but not the funny looking creature in a glass case I stood marvelling at all those years ago. Where had that connection come from?

I sipped my wine. Yes, why was I taking a picture of the wall?

‘I’m just checking the lens setting.’ I replied.

Of course I wasn’t.