Unnatural signs and wonders?
The redwings swept in from distant countryside, birds I hadn’t seen since I lived on the edge of Dartmoor, twenty or so years ago. They swarmed onto a chestnut tree behind my back wall before stripping a nearby hollybush of all its berries, and moving on. (Driving across the moor at Christmastime we had every species of weather in an hour: December sunshine, clear and bright as brass, a snowstorm, sleet, rain, and a giddy ascent into the clouds near Vixen Tor. Lapwings, yes, but I never saw a redwing, although at that moment I’d forgotten I remembered them, if you see what I mean.) Now I briefly got one of those Shakespearean fits: what did it portend, this surge of country birds into the middle of London? The fall of the House of Windsor? The return of Edgar Allan Poe? The re-election of Gordon Brown? It was the freeze that brought them, of course, a matter of survival. But, as I watched through binoculars, their presence connected me to half-forgotten bits and pieces of my past: a ch...