by Simon Barnes
My father obviously approved of my getting a job after university – he had been half-expecting me to decamp to India and never be seen again. Amazing to think that had I gone, I would have done so without the guidance of Salim Ali, the doyen of Indian ornithology and creator of India’s first field guides. I once saw a shikra – a jet-propelled Asian hawk – when covering a cricket match in Bangalore, but that is by the way.
But I wanted to write for my living, and journalism offered the only obvious option. So with a suit and a tie, and hair at least a little trimmed, I set off to work for the Surrey Mirror in Redhill. One of the first stories I did was about somebody who had a pet owl – a tawny, as I recall. It shat on my suit. As if to say: “Bourgeois!”
I remember talking to my father during the worst of my time on local papers, bullied, oppressed and persecuted by an editor who admitted later, “Of all the journalists I have had under me, he was the one I hated the most.” I groaned and told my father about the horrors of having to go to work the following morning. He said: “I have never not enjoyed going to work.” There was still a gap in understanding, then. I felt oppressed by the scale of his achievement and his total absorption with his professional life; he felt bewildered and disappointed by my poor showing and my lack of relish for the great world of jobs.
Well, I did go to India. I went as part of my annual leave, not as a drop-out. Though I was, naturally, seeking the meaning of life. And I loved India from the first moment. How could anybody not? My heart was filled with the East after that, and I had to go and live in Asia. A couple of years later, I was living on Lamma island, a 45-minute ferry ride from Central District, Hong Kong, working as a freelance journalist, travelling all the time to various thrilling places around the region. And seeing the occasional thrilling bird. I was never quite sure whether my ignorance was part of the pleasure. I loved the mystery of the great birds I knew nothing about, but there was something inside me that wanted to put names to them. Obscurely, I felt that the names mattered.
Lamma has, or had, a good few nice birds – it’s been built up hugely since my time. In particular, there is the bird that nobody ever sees. In spring, it sings a four-note call, again and again: the first and third notes the same, the second note a semitone lower, the last with a drop of a minor third. So a musician told me, anyway. When the spring ran hot and strong in the blood, and the moon was high and the wooded slopes and the maniacally manicured market gardens were washed in silver light, the Chinese cuckoo sang all night. “One more bot-tle! One more bot-tle!” If ever a bird sang the national anthem of a place, it was the Chinese cuckoo. In those boozy days at the far end of the Empire’s tether, it was advice we seldom rejected.
I didn’t know it was a Chinese cuckoo then, of course. But when a friend of mine – another lost birdwatcher who never watched birds – told me it was a Chinese cuckoo, I was quietly satisfied. Obscurely, I felt it mattered. Obscurely, I felt that the meaning of things, the ability to put a name to things, was important. And obscurely I wanted to put a name to even more things. I didn’t know how, of course, but I had a feeling that it was important.
8. Simon knows the names of things
And Adam gave names to all the cattle, and to the fowls of the air, and to every beast of the field.
Genesis 2.20
Jeremy was, and no doubt still is, a raffish and rather fastidious intellectual. He made his living by translating French novels into English, and he used to play for Tewin Irregulars, a raffish and not-at-all fastidious cricket team I helped to run. Jeremy was an elegant and immensely reliable right-hand bat – reliable insofar as he practically always turned out for us. He was less reliable when it came to the scoring of runs, but he always looked good. Shirtless Tim, incidentally, used to play for the Irregulars as well, bowling speculative medium-pace.
Jeremy had no interest in birds. Literature, exotic girlfriends and an establishment in Clapham called The Tea-Room des Artistes fulfilled most of his needs. And he once sent me a poem. It was called “Simon knows the names of things”. He told me that he awoke one morning with this unexpected sentence running through his mind, and the only way to get rid of it was to turn it into a poem. It is a nice sentence – rhythmic and ringing with those four Ns – and it was a nice poem.
But it is the last line that has stayed with me. I like it, I think, though I am still not quite sure whether or not to take offence. Does it mean that I am wise and widely learned, a person people turn to whenever they find a void in their knowledge? Or does it mean I am a nerd, someone packed with useless information that no one wants to know about, a person always imparting facts more interesting to myself than to others? In short, something of a full-time bore? Well, since this was a nice poem, the answer is probably both.
But it’s true. I do know the names of things. Some things, anyway. I like words and names and I have a mind that tends to hold on to them. I have, for example, been gazing at a pebble identification chart. It came free with a magazine and it has been on my desk for some days, and I keep looking at it in obscure delight. I knew what a flint was, but did you know what a chert is? Well, flints and cherts are both kinds of silica, or quartz pebbles. A chert has a typically waxy lustre. The illustration is beautiful and shiny, and it looks as if I could pick it up from the page and chuck it across the room. It looks like a pebble; and every time I see a pebble just like it, I shall say: Ah, observe the waxy lustre. This is a chert.
Do you know what a schist is? Did you know that the pink pebbles that look like little fossilised brains are in fact flints cracked and coloured by fire? Do you realise that this little chart could change my relationship with pebbles for ever?
Because names matter. Names of everything. You feel noticeably different about Jane than you do about that woman from accounts. If you go regularly to a nice pub, the landlord and landlady will not only learn your name, but they will make sure that you know theirs. They know that the learning of names changes your relationship with the people and thus with the pub. If you fly business class, you find the staff are trained to call you by your name: a small ploy to make sure you feel you are getting your money’s worth. Another whisky, Mr Barnes? The poor sods at the back just get sirred.
I have given myself considerable quiet pleasure in recent years by trying to learn butterflies. I have done it extremely badly. If I am a bad birdwatcher, then I am a perfectly appalling butterfly-watcher. I’m barely at the nut-feeder stage. I know only the common ones that I see around where I live: peacocks, small tortoiseshells, meadow browns, and so forth. But never mind – life is richer even for this poor fund of knowledge. Knowing some of the names makes me look at butterflies in a way I never used to: I like to see who it is that has come a-calling. I look more, I see more, I relish more. Sometimes the painted ladies come, and even I know that they come here on migration, flying over the Channel on their silly, feeble, fluttery wings, and when I see a few – they generally arrive mob-handed – I can savour the small miracle of their arrival. In Cornwall last summer, the cliffs were swarming with clouded yellows. Before I learned my poor few butterfly names I would scarcely have noticed them. As it was, they added pleasure to every day.
I am even worse at trees. I love to be with people who can tell me their names, so that I feel that small but significant change of relationship that comes from knowing a name. I learned to recognise field maple, for the excellent reason that I had some planted in a hedge. Now I can recognise it when it is part of ancient hedgerow. I walk past an ancient hedgerow every day with my dog. You can tell that the hedgerow is ancient because of the mix of species. A friend of mine explained that, and told me some of the names. I liked the hedge well enough before, but knowing these few things about it makes it better. This scrap of knowledge adds to its mysteries rather than taking away from them. There is a particularly chunky field maple up by the stile. I know its name, it has shared something with me.
My understanding of the tree, the butterfly and the pebble has alte
red in some curious way because I know their names. That is because knowing something’s name is a highly significant thing. It is the most significant thing you can tell someone about yourself. An American will announce his name with his first breath; the English prefer to keep people waiting before imparting that treasured scrap of information.
And what, after all, was Adam’s first job? It was to name all the animals. Naming comes first; everything else follows, including Eve. Adam had to establish some kind of understanding of the world he lived in and the creatures he shared it with. So, naturally, the first task was the naming of names.
It seems clear that Adam was history’s first bad fowls-of-the-air-watcher. It is also a fact that bad birdwatching makes Adams of us all. Birdwatching is a way of changing your relationship with the world, and it begins with names. You might argue that humans gave the creatures their names, and that a yellowhammer won’t care whether you call him a yellowhammer or a Cretszchmar’s bunting or, for that matter, a Dalmatian pelican.
But a yellowhammer is still a yellowhammer. A yellowhammer knows it’s a yellowhammer even if he doesn’t think of it in those precise terms. The cock bird knows he is a bird that sings “a little bit of bread and no cheese”, and the hen bird knows the cock has a bright yellow head. And it’s no good either of them being vague about the subject of being a yellowhammer, because they can’t make babies with a Cretszchmar’s bunting, still less a Dalmatian pelican. And, if you are not out there doing all you can to become an ancestor, then what is the point of being out there at all? In evolutionary terms – and how else does life work? – none at all. It matters to a yellowhammer that it is a yellowhammer: and it matters to a yellowhammer that he or she can only make little yellowhammers with the help of another yellowhammer. A female Cretszchmar’s bunting simply won’t make a male yellowhammer go “phwoar”. And calling him a yellowhammer is our human way of recognising this important fact (of course it’s important, ask the yellowhammer). And with recognition comes the beginning of understanding. If you like, the beginning of science.
Science is the study of names. Science names everything: processes and things, living and unborn. Everything starts with a name. Philosophers argue about the importance of a name. A name demonstrates the existence of a shared concept; yellowhammer is not one person’s wacky idea, it is a bird we can all know and have a relationship with. There is no such thing as a private language: in order for sounds to become a language, they must be shared. A name is the sharing of a thing. And by acquiring the name, you can share it with me, with everybody who likes wild things. I can tell you that I saw a nice bird the other day, and you can say, ah yes, good. But I can tell you that I saw a yellowhammer, and you might almost have been with me.
I have talked a lot here about the change in relationship that happens with the acquisition of a name. Naturally, this is a one-way relationship. Let’s not get all silly and New Age-ish about this. Birdwatching is almost by definition a one-way relationship: you try very hard not to disturb the bird. You don’t want it to fly off. You don’t want it to know you are there; you don’t want it to know you exist. It is considered very poor show to bung a brick at a ringed plover to make it fly off so you can see whether or not it has wing-bars (if it hasn’t, it is a little ringed plover, and much more exciting). One of the great treats of watching nature is to do so when the creature observed is completely unaware of your existence. It is a very special joy; more, it is a very special privilege, and I have done this with elephants and rhinoceroses as well as with yellowhammers.
A one-way relationship is very far from an invalid one. I have, for example, a very important and – to me – very meaningful relationship with James Joyce. True, he died before I was born. Joyce doesn’t know I exist any more than that yellowhammer does, but both, in their different ways, are important to me.
But then I deal with one-way relationships all the time. I write about sport, and people frequently have extremely intense relationships with the people who do it. People who watch sport have significant feelings for David Beckham, Steve Redgrave, Jonny Wilkinson, Sir Alex Ferguson, Paula Radcliffe, Venus and Serena Williams. Only one or two of these, so far as I know, are aware that I exist. (I have been told that Ferguson once referred to me as “fucking Simon Barnes”. I am planning to adopt this as a byline.)
Thus the plunge of a little tern into a coastal pool, or the sudden impossible blue shimmer of a whizzing kingfisher, does not mean that my sudden flight of joy is shared with the plunging or shimmering bird. But it is joy nonetheless. And it is joyful particularly because when I see the flash, I don’t have to wonder what it is. I am a good enough bad birdwatcher – or at least an experienced enough bad birdwatcher – to see the blue flash and to be able to put a name to that flash. Kingfisher, I say, where another might say, bloody hell, it couldn’t have been, could it? And mine is the heart that leaps.
9. Alice’s key
And she ran with all speed back to the little door; but alas! the little door was shut again and the little key was lying on the glass table as before, “and things are worse than ever,” thought the poor child.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Once you start to look at birds – once your eyes follow the flight of a passing crow or a bunch of starlings whirling across the road without any conscious decision having been made – then sooner or later you will have a sight of such wonder and perfection that you will always be a birdwatcher. This is nothing less than a statistical certainty. It is a sight, a moment that confirms your growing interest and makes it part of your life for ever afterwards. It is the moment when you realise that birdwatching isn’t something to do with other people. You, too, can see wonders.
It might be a great-spotted woodpecker coming to the nut-feeder: something so marvellous that you feel astonished to be sharing the same planet. It doesn’t worry you that great-spotted woodpeckers are pretty common birds, and that seeing them is a knack relatively easily acquired. When you see the picture of them in the field guide, they look outrageous: impossible that so extraordinary, so gaudy a bird should exist in this country, still less flaunt itself before you.
Suddenly you have the key to those wonders. Poor Alice wanted to get into the beautiful garden, but the key was on a glass table and she was too small to climb its slithery legs. “How she longed to get out of that dark hall and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains.” Then she grew enormous and she could reach the key all right, but she was now far too big to get through the door. All she could do was lie on the floor and put her eye to the door and peer at the gorgeousness that was forever out of reach.
This is a sad tale about the horrors of growing up, and the sense of wonder that you leave behind you when you become big. For me, birdwatching became Alice’s key: birdwatching opens the door to the garden. But this sight of wonder, this conversion experience, this confirmation bird, does something that Alice’s key never could. It makes you small enough to enter the door. There is something childlike about the best of birdwatching: the sensation of seeing wonders – and it gives endless savour to the more grown-up aspects of the pleasure, the naming and understanding and relishing.
When I lived in Hong Kong I fancied myself as a bit of a wheeler-dealer, like everybody else in that town in those days. I was asked to write a series of travel pieces for an in-flight magazine, and was offered a decent sum of money for doing so. Not good enough. I said I would do it in exchange for two return tickets to Sri Lanka, to be donated by the airline I was writing for. After a bit of arguing, they agreed. I wrote nine city-portraits (The striking contrast of ancient and modern at the busy hub of Asia’s teeming metropolis, etc, etc) and collected two economy class (so I just got sirred) tickets to Sri Lanka. The second ticket I gave to a girl named Cindy. The selection of that name is probably the only unkind thing her mother ever did in her life, but that was and is her name, so that’s what I call her.
We spent six
weeks on that wonderful island and did everything: beaches, ruins, temples, towns, villages, elephants. We made a supposedly risky trip to Jaffna, the Tamil area, shortly after the library had been torched by the police, so that I could get a story for the Far East Economic Review. It was a great trip: and it had one significant omission. I had not visited any of the wildlife parks.
I didn’t want to go. I resisted. I had a horror of doing it badly, of being disappointed. I had a hunger to see wildlife, but a desperate need not to be caught up in some unsatisfactory experience. In short, I was afraid.
It was the last day of our trip. We had a flight that afternoon. We were in a town called Hikkaduwa, which was then a hippified beach resort where you could get an avocado milkshake and a pair of drawstring trousers with buttoned ankle cuffs. And Cind went off for a bit of shopping, and went vague. She came back after two hours with a seraphic smile on her face and some nice presents for her family. So we missed the plane. There wasn’t another plane for a week. And because my ticket was a freebie, it couldn’t be transferred to another airline. We were stranded in Sri Lanka. There are worse things that can happen to a chap, especially when he is accompanied by Cind. I knew I should be back in Hong Kong writing up some of my stories, but we had a plan and I was intoxicated by its beauty. It was Cind’s plan: a plan that cut through my own nervousness. I was nervous because I wanted, quite desperately, for things to go well.
We were going to devote seven days to wildlife. We would go to as many wildlife parks as we could. I would write about it, naturally. And we would do it properly. I managed to hire a pair of binoculars in Colombo – the idea of travelling without binoculars seems to me absurd, as if this story took place not so much at another time as to another person. But anyway, shared binoculars at our side, we set off.
