Gulls

It’s pretty chill here with the gulls and the cat.

Mum was a sixties girl. She adored Richard Bach. When we lived in Jersey we had a seagull that lived on the roof. It nested there. Mum used to throw all the food waste out onto the balcony in the kitchen. Yes there was a balcony in the kitchen. Local small birds would come, but largely “Jonathan Livingstone Seagull” would wallop around and help himself.

Seagulls are no slouches. Big birds often have better brains than we want them to. Crows are a good point in case. But even if gulls are entirely motivated by their stomach – (crows like to play) – they can still learn patterns. My grandmother had a knock that she would use so mum and dad knew it was her not the postman. She would come every day. The seagull learnt the knock. I kid you not. Jonathan would knock my grandmother’s knock on the skylight, and one of us would run downstairs to let her in and she wasn’t there. Then we would work it out and shout “Muuuum, Jonathan is hungry!” And if there were kitchen scraps, they went to him. “There’s a bowl by the aga!” Before I was ten I was throwing fat to the birds, often recognisably the fat I had rejected with my dinner. Fussy kid, I was. Unbelievably fussy. Something shifted in early adulthood and I went from eating about three things only to being a proper omnivore. But my leavings went into that balcony for the sparrows (they still existed back then) and for flollopy Jonathan.

This morning at about half five Tessy came and jumped on me. At about six I started to hear a seagull beak on the skylight. No pattern but a very pointed noise. At about quarter to seven I decided to get up and turn Tessy’s food around for her. She had left some uneaten. Normally I just chuck it and replenish but that seagull knows Lou and is clearly both expectant and hungry. It’s not fair to throw unwanted cat food out when there is a hungry seagull upstairs. Better to a hungry animal than to landfill. We could all manage our waste infinitely better.

So the animals were all fed. I love that Lou takes care of the local gulls. They can be territorial and bullies but they’re just birds, with all that bird stuff. Attitude. Opportunism. Greed. Like pelicans, they’ll eat pigeons if they can. We are all more like birds than we think.

I’ll keep feeding that gull. When I opened the skylight he was right on me. If I had died in that moment he’d already be halfway through eating me. That’s the way of it though. As soon as our immune system stops we get eaten from the inside by the things that live in us.