A swallow scissors the air in an ascending arc then disappears altogether, escaping as it were through a flap cut in the ether.
Somewhere to the left a gull shrieks, as though in admiration of this vanishing act. Three, four seconds maximum this transitory action. Surely, it will be back, streaking silently, blackly, down the shute of an invisible air wave... and then up again, tiny wings fanned, gathering strength for the up-thrust.
One minute, two, three.... ten go by but they tick emptily, swallow-less. The bird has found other slipstreams to navigate. All that remains is the screeching discontent of the gulls, fighting selfishly over everything: scraps of bread, un-alert fishlings, even the odd orange or red multi-spotted ladybird on the grassy bank.
You'd think that a ladybird, so named, would be safe from a seagull, but not these ones, stirred uncontrollably by omnivorous juices. They're pecking at everything and anything, disgraceful but uncaring in their disorderly behaviour.
How crass the gull painted beside the elegant swallow. It reminds me of a saying: "When we fall, we don't fall half way." And if the fall is irredeemable, if the chance of vertical uprightness once more is denied, then shamelessness - perched ever expectantly in the wings - flies in, an ally in masquerade, offering airy-fairy advice. "If the world don't care about you, why care about the world, eh?" "If you're alone on board the Down and Out Express, take some passengers with you."
"Turn the tide of your despair on your fellows. Everybody has a gull inside, just put them in touch. Bicker, squabble, needle, covet, pilfer, swindle. These, too, are isms, dogmas, ideals of a kind one enlists when seeking reaction. Everybody reacts at some point, because reaction is an inbuilt reflex. So, go on, goad them. Sing a song of confrontation: This land is your land, this land is my land. Watch how the weapons come marching out of the armoury, freshly-oiled. Watch how a war's fundamental building blocks are cemented with a liberal coating of suspicion, mistrust, alarm, self-defence, abhorrence and finally... hatred, abiding and eternal, that generations of diplomacy will never cleanse."
Other words
Watch, in other words, how a swallow becomes a gull. Gulled by a gull. Watch how the swallow, in its provoked state, forgets its superior status; forgets how the miserable gull it is that indeed looks up to it: the swallow.
Self-assuredness, in the flash of a swallow-wing, as in the blink of an eye, can like weirdly moulting plumage fall off and be replaced by a faux downy coat of insecurity. Watch how the swallow struggles from then on. Then watch how the gull - this big froggy in its filthy little muddy pond - exerts its superiority. Then perceive, if you will, one of the true tragedies that we the living enact with monotonous regularity.
Take a look at the enfeebled swallow, now in reactionary mode, fighting a fight it was never trained to; scrapping over scraps it never hungered for; jostling for space when it once owned the skies.
Observe how this fresh-faced innocent now enlists in the Army of the Discontent and, pathetically, learns how to rub shoulders with the fallen, its intellect - once its sharpest weapon that easily sniffed out and sensed the presence of eagles and hawks - now unburdened.
Many think it's the heart that is the most easily broken. Perhaps so. But it's the mind - that arcing vault of knowledge - that bends first.
And a mind that bends in supplication to a weaker intellect will hear the resultant snapping of the heartstrings followed by the shattering as the splintering gets under way.
Fifteen minutes... and suddenly, whirr, glide, dive almost parallel to the grass, bank to the left, climb steeply and soar away, in a glorious reprisal, a statement almost, saying: I may fly low, occasionally, but I shall not stoop so low. Hurrah for the swallow!
