Notes on The Starlings in the Porch Hole

I will not let my soft heart grow hard.

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Before I go further, I need to tell you about a few things: firstly, I currently have 10% off an annual subscription to my writing community Notes from the Margin. It needs to be redeemed by 30th April, so don’t hang about.

The other thing I need to tell you about is my upcoming zoom course Telling Your Story.

This course will run on Friday afternoons in May 2-3.30pm UK time. It’s all about telling your story through poetry and/or creative non fiction and we’ll be looking at craft aspects alongside discussing and analysing published extracts and as if that wasn’t enough, there will be writing prompts to help you get down to writing your story. The course is five weeks, the first four weeks are workshop weeks and the final, fifth week is a group feedback session.

This course is £50 and you can book through eventbrite, but it is FREE to paid subscribers of Notes from the Margin and I have 10% off an annual subscription until April 30th. That makes it £45 for a year of courses, workshops an community. Come join me!

Oh, and if you want to join me over on instagram I’m posting some snappy little prompts throughout April for NaPoWriMo

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‘Porch’ sounds posh, doesn’t it, but not as posh as vestibule. When I was growing up, I thought posh people had porches. I wonder why I thought that, it’s nonsense. I live in an ex council house, and it definitely has a porch and it definitely isn’t posh. Anyway, I have digressed, in the first paragraph, the first sentence. My porch roof has tiles, one of which is slightly slipping, and beneath which the concrete has come away, leaving a small, sheltered gap, next to the guttering. This is an ideal nesting place for starlings. And they have. Over the last few weeks, just like last year, the starlings have returned. First the checking out of the hole, then the standing at the hole and shouting at starling females to come and examine the nesting hole, then, surprisingly, a bit of a scrap that went on for over a week, between the nesting pair, as they began lining the nest hole, and another starling who thought they’d like the nest hole for themselves. Drama. Now there are beaks full of grubs and worms being brought to the nest hole, at regular intervals, so I assume the eggs are hatched. Soon I’ll be able to hear the baby birds as I go to collect my post on a morning. A familiar, vibrating grate of several small blind, pink bodies screaming for food, just above my head, just behind the plastering.

Photo by CandreK on Unsplash

I like to sit on a morning and drink my coffee in the front room, listening for the bird conversation, and it is a conversation of sorts. Alarm calls, territory disputes, calls from social birds who want to be in a group, calls from paired birds to each other, sometimes; with the starlings especially, clever mimicry - a car door shutting, the sweep of a broom, other birds - jackdaws, crows.

I think of myself as careful, and encouraging to nature, aware of the world around me, aware of my non-human neighbours. I wish to provide homes for the other animals living around and near me and allow for a bit of overgrowth, places to nest, hide, places to live in my garden.

This week though, a terrible shock. The ivy at the front of the house, next to the porch, had climbed over the windowsill and was making its way over the window glass, and across next door’s walls. It has gotten out of hand before. I took my secateurs and carefully cut back the overgrowth, just down to the windowsill, and across the wall where it was new growth, not thickened yet. It’s been raining heavily for such a long time, and now the sun is making an appearance the ivy has exploded. It is fast, it almost walks up the wall on those tiny little clinging feet. I am careful, and conscious and yet, still, when I stepped back, looked at where I had cut, so carefully, taking each individual leaf off at a time, a tail. A dark, feathered tail, poking out just under the top layer of the ivy, just under where I had trimmed the windowsill leaves from. A bird on a nest sitting still as a rock hoping not to be noticed. Possibly a blackbird, more likely a house sparrow. I did not hang about to identify it, I left, immediately, and hoped I had not disturbed it too much.

All day long afterwards, a terrible sadness. All day long a sadness that compounded the very profound sadness that I feel for the world right now, for the people, the trees, the environment. For the last week or so I have felt tired of living in a world that is so at odds to how I feel it should be. I am simply profoundly sad, and feeling a bit hopeless. Although I can see how hard some people are working to right that, it feels like humans have turned a corner somewhere, and can’t find our way back. And even though there is a definite awakening, a push forwards to do something, to make the connections, to close the distance between people and nature, it feels too late. This then, being completely unaware of the nest in the ivy, of assuming that I would know if anything was nesting there, feels like a metaphor for something bigger, the arrogance of mankind, that we would know, that we would know and own the world around us and control our impact on it.

What am I trying to say here? A Reform UK leader said people trying to cross the channel should drown. This just after people, including a child, literally drowned to death trying to cross the channel on a small boat. A life that was valuable just for being a life is gone and a man with no need to flee thinks it’s ok. Someone chopped down an entire row of cherry trees in blossom in the night in Dublin, for reasons no one knows. Their white-brown inner trunks exposed to the light like broken bones. I watched a TikTok of a farm worker filming new born calves and singing ‘baby steaks’ to the tune of the children’s song ‘baby sharks’. A substantial portion of woodland has been poisoned by people dumping illegal waste on the site, the council so slow to act that now everything is poisoned - the woodland, the ground, the water.

All this stuff - it layers itself in sadness in my head, in my heart. I feel poisoned by the sadness of it all.

Then this tiny beacon of hope in the form of an article noting the change in protest, in awareness, people wanting to connect to their environment, their nature. And then someone sharing it on twitter, agreeing with the points raised but also asking - why must we always be thinking in terms of spirituality, why not just enjoy nature for what it is.

There’s no right or wrong way of looking at it, I suppose, but I say bring back, if not spirituality, at least reverence for the world we live in, for our non-human neighbours, and for our human neighbours, for life, for the amazing thing that means that we are aware of ourselves, aware of our bodies in nature, and of the way that nature is around us, and that we too are a part of that nature.

I feel weird saying it but I do feel a spiritual connection to nature, perhaps because in nature I am authentically myself, and that feeling of authenticity removes me from the human machine in which I always feel I have to act in a certain way to get along.

I say bring back reverence for life, bring back reverence for death, for the animals that, if you are going to kill and eat, should be cared for with compassion, and given a death that is respectful and kind. Why is kindness and compassion seen as weakness? When you build your society on the idea of life being disposable, of compassion being a weakness, of life being a product, of the only value a human life can hold is in its productivity, when you make life itself into a product, you are on a road to destruction.

I would feel better if I wasn’t on social media so much. Good news doesn’t sell papers, or get clicks, only bad news does that, and increasingly, only polarised anger and fear does that.

Now I ground myself in my cosy little living room, in my ex council house where the starlings are nesting in the porch hole, and the goldfinches are nesting in the elder, and, I hope, the bird on the nest in the ivy is still on her nest, despite my intrusion.

I promise myself that I will not let my soft heart grow hard.

That is all.

Until next time

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