Home again.
After 800 miles and stops in (deep breath) Durham, Barnard Castle, Harrogate, Leeds, Liverpool, Bangor (the one in north Wales), Anglesey, Chester, Liverpool again, Manchester and Kendal – or alternatively, two cathedrals, two museums, one sculpture park, one gig, one day at the beach, three shouting matches (1), hundreds of dead flies and one dead pigeon – we arrived back in central Scotland last weekend and that familiar end-of-holiday air of misery. Work on Monday. The thought of it. It settles on you like a slow puncture.
The fact the holiday was mostly great (2) makes the return to normality all the worse. The weather was hot, we saw loads of our friends and the temper tantrums (3) had mostly subsided by the middle of the week.
The dead pigeon was some kind of omen, though. The flies are just a fact of life. If you go on a journey of any length your car is going to end up crusty with remains, a mortuary of wings and antennae. But you can't ignore a pigeon.
Thing is, the pigeon wasn't dead when I first saw it. We'd just left Kendal, climbed over Shap Fell and joined the motorway south of Penrith when it appeared. I was in the inside lane and it was flying from the right, its little wings beating as it desperately tried to outrace the three cars that filled the road. You could see it dip lower and lower as it tired and unfortunately the moment it reached our lane coincided – in space and time – with our car.
It hit the passenger side of the bonnet with a meaty thump and, as we hurtled on at 70mph, all I could see in the driver's mirror was a puff cloud of feathers fluttering beautifully, horribly, to the ground.
What's particularly distressing is this is the second pigeon I've killed in as many months. It's not so long ago that another one appeared out of nowhere on the road to Denny to commit some kind of Columbidae hara-kiri on my car. I'm beginning to think I've been appointed some kind of pigeon culler general and nobody has told me.
Of course, typical human, I imagine that this, in some way, is all about me, me, me. As soon as we arrived home I started worrying that all this death and destruction was some dread symbol of my post-50 future, a kind of careening helter-skelter flight towards darkness. I raise this with J. She looks at me with both contempt and pity. "I think the pigeons might see it differently," she tells me. "If they were still alive to see."
She has, I must admit, a point.
Twitter: @teddyjamieson
FOOTNOTES
[1] That's Durham and Chester; Bowes and Abbot Hall; Yorkshire; Goldfrapp; Rhosneigr and rows about hats. And the weather. Or both.
(2) Have you ever been to Anglesey? It's really handsome. Looks a bit like the Antrim coast. This is a good thing.
(3) OK, my temper tantrums.
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