Swift Diaries

Leave-Taking

I took this photo on a hot night in Montpellier just over a month ago. The image has something of the quality of a cave painting about it. But these creatures were stenciled on the pavement just off the main shopping drag - strange, spectral, seemingly arbitrary in this sidewalk setting. But it must be a bird (I would hazard a guess that they are swallows) that is associated with the city as the No 1 Tram we took the next day toward Place de France was freely patterned with versions of them as well.

Birds often have a symbolic connection with places, whether they are merited or not (I didn’t see any swallows during my brief time in Montpellier - though I saw martins beside the beach of the coastal resort we were staying at twenty miles away). I’m inspired by how many of the telephone exchange boxes just down the road from me are painted with swifts in celebration of their return each year. This is a new ‘association’, one magicked up over the past five years or so. Many of the posts I made over the summer featured the swift art I came across on surrounding streets.

These already fading murals are the closest we’ll get to swifts for the next eight months (brightening the corners in slushy snow; acting as harbingers in springtime). Until recently I still looked up. The temperature had held up pretty well from the beginning of August, when the Crookes swifts left, through the rest of the month. Yes, I kept thinking, swifts could still patrol the skies in this weather. Though how many airborne insects there were around in early September to feed on was another question. It’s only in the last few weeks or so that we’re hitting below ten degrees at night. Blustery rain is setting in. I’m losing the idea that swifts could still pivot and curve over the telephone wires. I’m beginning to forget how they inhabited the air above us.

Over the past fortnight we’ve taken two of our children to different universities to start their degrees. One has ended up in Glasgow (a city I wrote about here in a previous post), the other to Manchester. Once we’d dropped off the second child in Victoria Park I had all sorts of thoughts about leave-taking that I have yet to process fully, if at all. Already I can see how our house has changed in its dimensions, its movements and its soundscape with the departure of William and Joseph.

It has also made me think about the music I took for granted as a backdrop to my daily routines (William is away to do a Music degree). Outside, the swifts changed the whole pitch of the sky above our road with their screeches. Now mostly the out-sized sounds we hear are diesel engines pulling up and racing down the hill. But it wasn’t only the birds’ chorus - it was their flights as well that changed the energy on the road. Swifts change the whole dynamic of a neighbourhood: there might only be a few birds, or they might be joined by their brethren in a screaming cloud, but in the summer months they make me focus on the minutiae of the moment, the possibility of something altogether real and fantastical skimming over my head. The swifts brought something I could name but not nearly understand. I lived in wonder and want. It’s these feelings that I miss.

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This is the last Swift Diaries post I’ll send out this year. You might see me using Substack to advertise The Two-Way Poetry Podcast, starting in October - the platform where I interview poets about influence, technique, poetics. But I’ll return to Substack as a reader for the foreseeable future. I’ll look up at the skies again in late April next year and think about creating more diaries and posts. Thanks to everyone for reading, liking and commenting on the weekly articles (and notes). I really appreciate your response to my words. I didn’t know what to expect - a bit like with my sky-watching over the summer - but thank you again for your time and attention.