The Banishing of Huginn

I'm blessed by having many wild birds around my house. There are all sorts of birds, and as I live here longer, I am getting better at identifying the different species. There are wrens, wagtails, great tits and brave little robins; pigeons, blackbirds and magpies in various numbers from ominous one, through joy to silver, gold and dark secrets. And then there are the corvids: hooded crows, like capuchin monks and rooks, loads and loads of rooks. I lump them together as "crows". The rooks roost in the oaks and return home for sunset, squabbling as they settle for the night. 

My wife was in the habit of feeding the birds in the early evening. She would scatter seed and shattered fat-balls on the back lawn. You can't feed the smaller birds without feeding the crows, who are fiercely intelligent. A sentinel or two would be stationed on the ridge of the garage roof and within seconds of food being scattered on the ground, the sky would darken and the ground covered with raucous family groups: this year's spoiled fledglings demanding to be fed by over-tolerant parents scarcely larger than themselves.

One afternoon in early autumn, I was standing at the back door observing the crows. Many were picking away at the lawn, looking for seeds or scraps they had missed earlier. A few were strutting about, proudly grasping an acorn in their beak. When they found what seemed to them a suitable spot, they would put the nut down carefully, peck a hole, place the acorn in the hole and cover it up. They would then turn away, apparently satisfied with their work. I can't see the point myself, but I understand how oaks are planted.

I had some minor tasks to do, so I went outside and before I started I paused for a moment and surveyed the crows. They have grown used to me and after a brief fluttering of wings they settled back to their business of gleaning.

Suddenly, a single rook separated from the group and flew straight towards me. I stood my ground. I don't claim bravery, rather the slow responses of advancing years. The bird turned upwards, its wings spread and its feet extended towards me. It alighted on my right shoulder. I felt its weight shift as it adjusted its position and I turned towards it. I found myself face to face (or maybe nose to beak) with the bird. It seemed to be a juvenile, with a black beak, rather than the boney grey of an adult. As it turned its head from side to side I was looking into its eyes. I was entranced, frozen as if in the presence of great power. The bird was not hostile, instead it projected calm, but uncaring interest, a remote intelligence observing and noting my actions. Unbidden, I extended my right arm, until it was horizontal, my hand clenched in a loose fist. The bird walked calmly along my arm until it was perched on my hand. Its feet were scaly and cool. I put my left hand, palm upwards, in front of it and it reached across and gently gripped my fingers and the skin of my palm. This was not an aggressive act, not a peck, just a gentle caress and I could feel the serrations of his beak.

For the rest of the day, and the whole of the following day, I had a new companion. I decided "he" was a boy (though I cannot tell the difference, and it matters only to other rooks) and named him Huginn. He would come to me when I was outside, perch on my shoulder and fist and eat from my left hand. He took cat food from a small saucer I held in my hand and even half a hard-boiled egg directly from my palm.

On the third day he was gone: no more Huginn. There was no sign of him. He had disappeared without leaving a trace except in my memory, returned to the emptiness from whence he came. I missed him as one would expect to miss such a companion. I still miss him and mark his absence. Stories of talking birds and magical familiars now seem much more real and much more likely than they once did. Experience is a powerful tutor. 

The worldly explanation is that Huginn was probably a chick from the previous year. He had "imprinted" on one of the women who work at the garden centre which is associated with the COPE (Roughly the Irish equivalent of SCOPE) across the road. As he had become more confident he had begun venturing further afield and had found me. The reason he had disappeared was that unfortunately he had begun to become a nuisance at the Garden Centre, disturbing customers and the residents at the COPE home. As a consequence he had been tempted into a cage and then "re-homed" some distance away. We all hope that he is happy and will eventually find a mate.

Of course, there could be another explanation, one which if I'm honest, I rather prefer. In Norse and Germanic mythology Odin, the chief of the gods, who traded one eye for wisdom, was served by two ravens known as Huginn and Muninn (memory and thought) who brought him news of all they had seen in the world. There seems to have been uncertainty or dispute about whether Huginn and Muninn were simply messengers or whether they were extensions of Odin himself. Whichever they were, I like to imagine that I had an encounter with the numinous, the divine, and that Huginn has returned to Odin with the message that I had been set a test (which I do not fully understand) and that my response had been satisfactory. 

(I originally called this "The Murder and the Banishing of Huginn", to use the collective noun for a group of crows. When I read it, I thought it was a piece of unworthy click-bait!)

[Original Events: 13th and 14th July 2025]

[Date: 6th October 2025]                

Masquerades of Spring

 [Notes for my friend Mike on Masquerades of Spring from the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch]

Masquerades of Spring

I enjoyed it. Not Aaronovitch's best, but still fun. I liked how we learned just a little bit more about Thomas Nightingale without disclosing too much: so this is why he likes jazz.

One of the features of first person story-telling is that you have a relationship with the narrator. I recognise that I don't particularly like Gussie.

The story is written as pastiche PG Wodehouse, with Gussie as Bertie Wooster and Beauregard as Jeeves. Gussie doesn't appeal to me as a person but I don't dislike him.

It strikes me that Gussie is actually smarter than he acts (or he himself realises) but he has learned to be stupid or helpless because he's lazy and it allows him to stand back and let other people do the work - because he can.

I thought that Beauregard was underused as a character. There's more potential there if Aaronovitch choses to use it.

The story is classic McGuffin. We never encounter the magic saxophone and the magic trumpet is returned to the villain Jaeger without doing anything more than "a queer sort of harmonic buzz at the words 'let it out'" (p58). We never really learn much about the instruments, except that they 

are a distress signal from Maurelle. Nor do we learn how Maurelle is imprisoned. We know it is because of her daughter Oriande, and we learn that Jaeger is exploiting Maurelle's power. We don't know how someone as powerful as Maurelle can apparently be controlled so easily.

All this is actually quite clever. We make up our own partial explanations and we are always left wanting for more.

Talking of "wanting for more", there are some good peripheral/tangential details about Nightingale. IMO we will never learn much about Nightingale. 

He's a stock character, the man of mystery. He will remain: a superman with flaws, the last of his kind. In the main sequence he has (well managed) 

PTSD as a result of what happened at Ettersburg.

The new details I like are that Gussie secretly fancies Nightingale ("I might have thought the situation has romantic possibilities" (p47)). 

Gussie is also jealous of Nightingale, especially that Nightingale fancy Lucy ("I am not by nature a violent man..." (p41)). Nightingale is, of course, sexless - that is the nature of the stock character.

Another detail hinted at is the nature of Nightingale's relationship with Molly. We aren't told what it is, except that it is strong enough to make Nightingale drop what he is doing, risk censure from The Folly and cross the Atlantic.

Gussie is sufficiently stupid that he hasn't twigged that he has been set up with Beauregard. It takes him a while to appreciate that Cocoa/Amelia is more than just a pretty girl - he clearly doesn't appreciate how powerful she probably is.

There are some nice hooks into "The Virginia Company" and whatever magic there is in New Orleans. It would seem that The Queen of Joy, Beauregard, Cocoa and the midwives are all part of something.

Artistically, Aaronovitch may be using the novellas to give himself space away from the flow of the main series. The novella's introduce and explore new characters. He's also experimenting with different writing voices for the new narrators. If Masquerades of Spring was PG Wodehouse, then I think (not sure) that Winter's Gift's was Stephen King.

Out of universe, commercially the novella's provide an increased flow of product and Aaronovitch may be using them to fish for something from Hollywood.

And... Masquerade is being played for laughs more than usual, with Gussie cast as clown: note the spells "Crocker" (felt up and stripped of clothes (p149)) and "Treaclefoot" (p53).

Some good throwaway bits:

"Are you a fairy? My mama is a fairy" (p137) and Nightingale in drag (of course he looks good).

Not the best, but good fun.   

  

The River at the bottom of my garden: 3 inter-dimensional portals and a goddess

Rivers of Ireland? Story 1: The River at the bottom of my garden: 3 inter-dimensional portals and a goddess

Ok. Try this for size. I suppose you could say that the whole basis of Aaronovitch's world in that there is magic just out of sight for most of us and that you can sense it if you just take the time to experience the vestigial. The submerged rivers of London are both characters in their own right and a metaphor for the magic.

In that vein, I'm going to describe some stuff. I'm not going to say I believe in the magic (I don't) but I'm going to hint at the vestigia and sometimes give the prosaic explanations too. I'm not going to attempt to imitate Aaronovitch's writing. The experiences and places and people are real, even if I've made small adjustments. I could take you to the places, show you the sights and you would experience some of the experiences. Whether or not you experienced the vestigia would be inside your own head.

Story 1 - The River at the bottom of my garden: 3 inter-dimensional portals and a goddess

I remember when you were over, oh so long ago, I took you to look into the field at the back of my house. I don't remember if I took you down to the river. Getting into the field used to be inconvenient. I had to walk down the road a hundred yards or so to reach the gate and then walk back to reach the back of the hedge of my own property. Well, now there is a better way.

This is one of a few good things to come out of COVID. Every year I trim the hedges around the boundary of my plot. It takes me a while because there is such a long boundary and so much hedge. And of course, Leylandii is what Kevin McCloud describes as "a horticultural thug". At the back of the house, I trim the back of the hedge on the field side too, because if I don't, the bits I can't reach from my side become a straggly ugly mess. I used to do this last because it involved walking down the road to the gate etc carrying the petrol hedge-trimmer.

Mid Covid, I set about trimming the hedge. This was one of the things I was allowed to do. Nobody, ever said I couldn't wander around inside my own boundary. The hedge was a job which needed doing, so I did it. In the back of my mind I must have been thinking about the back of the hedge. 

You know how it is when you notice something which has been there all the time in plain sight? Well that's what happened to me. I was cutting the hedge in the far corner of my garden, next to the boundary with my neighbour on that side, when I noticed that the hedge was less dense that I expected. There seemed to be a hedge plant missing and I could see a concrete fence post, complete with diagonal to take the strain, which created a sort-of gateway with the corner post between me and my neighbours. I pointed all this out to Nnnn and said "you know, I think I could go through there and it would make access to the back of the hedge much easier".

So we agreed, and I cut away the hedge and removed a piece of chain-link fencing (there is a chain-link fence, fronted by the hedge), and Bob's your uncle, there was a gateway. This was a job which, amazingly, went much easier than anyone expected. The (prosaic) explanation is that when my house was being built, the builders put up the boundary chain-link fence but left a gateway (complete with concrete sill!) in the corner for ease of access (they didn't want the problem I had encountered with walking along the road to the gate). When they were almost finished they had sealed the gate with a separate piece of fencing and planted the hedge. They'd been a bit economical with hedging plants in that corner but eventually the branches from two plants reached out towards each other and the closed the gap. It became invisible. All I had done was expose something which had been there all along. Surprisingly, there was a short pathway through a piece of natural hedgerow (not Leylandii) outside my boundary, where my neighbours had been taking their dogs out to walk in the field. By that time we'd been in the house for about twenty years and this was the first time we had noticed! The hedge is that thick!

After I had removed the piece of chain-link fence and done a very little bit of trimming I was left with an empty gateway between two concrete posts about 3 feet apart leading through a thick Leylandii hedge which is about 6 feet high. At the foot of the gateway is a short length of concrete kerb which the builders had installed as a door sill. They had really gone to that much trouble to make a proper gateway before eventually sealing it up. I filled the gateway with a simple low wicket gate constructed from pallet wood, liberally doused in creosote and closed with a bolt. Simples! The gate opens onto a short pathway (barely 6 feet long) through a natural hedgerow, leading from my neighbours land, outside my boundary, into the field. 

With the gate finished, I cut the back of the hedge at the bottom of the garden. What a difference the gate made! No more lugging the petrol hedge clipper all that way, throwing a cable over the hedge and using electric tools practical and forgetting a pair of loppers and having to go back for them was no longer a disaster. The job got done very quickly indeed. Only, a man's work is never done. Nnnnn didn't like being able to see the neighbours going to and fro to walk the dogs, and actually neither did I. There was something obtrusive about it. I like them, they get on with me, but I didn't want to see them and I didn't want them looking into the back garden. After a little thought, I constructed a high but very lightweight hurdle to put in front of our side of the little wicket gate. I fronted the hurdle with a piece of trellis with artificial greenery. The effect was miraculous! The gate was now invisible. The plastic leaves blended in with the evergreen hedge.

Time passes. I now go through the hedge and walk down to the river at least once a week, often several times. The gateway starts by being "invisible". Even for me, it doesn't stand out from the hedge. From the field side it is almost invisible too, and the eye is drawn from it by the route into my neighbours garden. The neighbours don't mind, the farmer doesn't know and the agricultural contractors who cut the grass for silage don't care. The cattle, when they are there, don't even notice. There is something magical about the process of going through the hedge. I start in front of the plastic greenery, remove that, go through the wicket gate, unfasten and refasten behind me a flap of square wire fencing and then duck under a single, almost invisible, length of galvanised wire at waist height and I'm in the field. Four, barriers in quick succession, two of them almost invisible. It's like parting curtains, one after another.

Each walk down to the river is an experience because the field and the river are changing constantly with the weather and with the seasons. I'm a good boy, so I usually walk round by the field boundary. Even going that long way round it's a short slow walk, 5 minutes at most, down a gentle slope to the bottom corner where the ground gets soft. The margin between the river and the field is marked by native trees: rowan and alder. In the summer and autumn my view of the river is obscured by a screen of bracken. Now in the winter I can see across the river. The water flows clear (but not too clear, the summer day when the water flowed "gin clear" is a different, bad and sad, story). In May the air is filled with May flies and in high summer damsels dance and flirt. There are several places where, if I am fortunate, I may glimpse the goddess. There she lies, lithe and elegant, facing upstream, sinuous limbs and muscular back, emerald green hair streaming down her back. Her skin is golden, mottled dark like a toad or lizard. In the summer she wears white flowers in her hair. I have never yet seen her face. I long for and fear what I might see.

Walking along the bank the atmosphere changes. The air becomes calm. The sounds of the road, far away, always quiet are silenced altogether and replaced by the whispering of the river. If I look towards my house it is no longer visible, even thought the line of sight is clear. I have passed into another world adjoining our own but separated from it.

Continuing along the river bank I climb a gentle slope to a point where the river margin widens to become a riparian woodland. As I climb, unexpectedly, the house becomes visible again just as I reach the boundary of the wood.

The prosaic explanation of the strange and perfectly real effects of the change in atmosphere and sound and the house being invisible are due to the lie of the land. The slope of the field is sort-of "s" shaped creating an effect like a ha-ha. There is a flat area near the river which is completely obscured from the top and you are not even aware of what you cannot see. You could pitch a small tent, and a man standing would be invisible from the top. The goddess in the river is the light on the broken limestone of the river bottom, illuminated by dappled light through the trees. Her flowing hair is water-weed growing from the river bottom. 

The entrance to the woodland is another multi-layered gateway. First there is an electric fence wire to duck under, then a galvanised trip wire to recognise, avoid and step over, and finally the remains of a collapsed fence to avoid. This brings you into a vestibule or anteroom from where you can look down on the rapids which are quite loud or forward, through trees to a well-trodden pathway which forks down to the river beach or forwards along a terrace into dense woodland. And every gateway should have a guardian, and this one is guarded by Lala (yes, the Teletubby), perched in a tree, who has been watching over this path since before I have known of its existence. If I were remaking this as real fiction, I think I would replace Lala with an animal skull.

   

   

When you get to our age: ailments, lathes and the river

Hi Mike, Good to hear from you! Just recently, for the first time, I find myself wanting to prefix what I'm going to say with "when you get to our age..." (wygtoa). It feels strange, and is really a bit unwelcome. I hope I didn't sound like I was nagging but (wygtoa) several of my friends and acquaintances have been suffering from ailments both serious and minor and sometimes I become just a little anxious that someone is in a poor state and I don't know about it. With that said, the last thing any of us needs is someone else going "are we there yet?", or similar, particularly if you are feeling out of sorts.

Sorry to hear you've been poorly. The flu/Covid you describe sounds nasty. I understand what you say about "unable to concentrate". I've experienced that myself, though fortunately not recently. Another symptom I have experienced is a feeling of "not really being there/present". I think that fancy name for that is "dissociation". That wasn't actually unpleasant, but it isn't something I want to repeat either. On the other hand, on a couple of occasions I think I've experienced minor hallucinations - that was just weird, "dissociation PLUS strange sensations". People pay a lot of money for experiences like that! As far as I'm concerned they're welcome to them.

I particularly understand the "not being able to read" bit. There was a brief time in his later years when my Dad had a spell like that. At the time, I felt really sorry for him because it took away a genuine simple pleasure. Fortunately the effect was due to diabetes and got fixed, so it was all ok in the end. I think he was re-reading one of the Brother Caedfael (spolling?) stories the week before he died.

I'm still waiting to pick up Rivers of London again. I simply haven't been in a bookshop recently and my library haven't come up with the goods yet. I've been wondering (in general) about graphic novels. I may give one a go (maybe even a RoL one). I think they are a legitimate art-form (like comics, plays, TV etc) but maybe suited to a particular audience, so I note your comments and accept that graphic novels may not be for me. One of the things I like about RoL is the discriptive work and the backgrounds and, of course, that will likely be lost in a graphic novel. I think I'm someone who falls into the category of "I prefer listening to plays on the radio to watching movies - the pictures are better!" Talking of plays on the radio, I was speaking to Chris Freemantle over the internet yesterday and he said that he had been "...listening to a Radio Four play...". I don't think I was fully paying attention to him, or perhaps it was my dodgy hearing, because just for a fraction of a second, I thought I had heard him say "...listening to radio foreplay...". I'll leave your imagination to fill in the gaps, because that momentary misunderstanding certainly had my mind boggling.

Well done for venturing out "on foot"! It's something I don't do enough of. If I was over there, I would be tempted to offer to join you. My exercise is mostly my cycle down to town most days to pick up a newspaper and minor groceries. That, and the same trip to the Men's Shed and then the pub two nights a week. Purchasing the bicycle was one of the better things I have done since coming full time to Ireland, and it was a complete whim. 

Tomorrow, at the Shed, my task of the evening is to connect two pins inside a push-button on/off switch on a lathe. It isn't "latching" as it needs to and I think the problem was that I had misunderstood the details of the wiring (part of the problem is retrofitting cheap Chinese components to ancient British equipment, with little or no documentation for either. The lathe is a small Myford). Internet diagram to the rescue. At tea one evening I was pleased to announce: "Three bits of good news: the lathe motor runs in both directions, there hasn't been a big bang, and I'm still alive!" If the "latch" works, then all I have to do is re-route some of the wiring and thoroughly clean the lathe (it's in a terrible state). I'm sure there will be other things to do as well.    

My other exercise is walking down to the river behind my house. You couldn't really call that a proper walk, but I enjoy it, and it's so convenient. I remember telling you about it. Making the gateway was another whim. The original reasoning was simple enough, the gate gives me access to cut the back of the hedge, but the effect has been much greater. I now go down to the river several times a week (weather and inclination permitting). Regarding ground conditions: one of the effects of making the same walk regularly is that one becomes aware of changes. Topsoil where I am is clay and the underlying ground is some sort of limestone or maybe shale (my geology is a bit dodgy). It has been a wet winter, even my local standards. The ground was very squidgy, even waterlogged but is now beginning to dry out. The river itself is changing. It was surging and opaque, like milky coffee, but yesterday the surface was flat enough, and the water clear enough, for me to see the rocky bottom in places. And I saw one or two bees (good) and today I saw a pair of swallows outside my house (that's even better). I have still to go down to the river today.

I'm going to break off there. I have to pick up the newspaper and I have a couple of small purchases to make in town. Keep in touch, even if it's only to say "I feel a bit crap, but I'm still here". It saves me worrying and prevents me from being a nag. Tell me about  any future walks.

Regards,

Tom

(17th April 2023)