LETTERS FROM LOCKDOWN
I swear the birds never used to be this shrill, this rowdy... essentially a car alarm in feathers
When you’ve been stuck in the house with the same people for five weeks, conversation is bound to pall. This certainly seems to be the view of my six-yearold son. Some days, he barely talks to us at all.
Instead, he uses a sound effects machine.
It’s just a cheap plastic trinket he got for Christmas, but he finds it extremely useful. When his parents ask him a question, he no longer needs to waste his precious time and energy opening his mouth.
He can reply by simply pressing one of the machine’s buttons. For example, the button that produces a round of applause. Or the button that
makes the “UR-URRRR” noise you hear on a game show when a contestant gets something wrong.
Me: “It’s half past eight! Are you dressed yet?”
Sound from boy’s bedroom: “UR-URRRR.”
Mama: “Would you like some dinner, darling?”
Sound from sofa: “Clapclap-clap-clap-clap.”
It’s great value. Sometimes I even use it myself.
“Dada, please I can play with the ipad?”
“UR-URRRR.”
vAccording to experts, the birds aren’t actually noisier than before. It just feels that way, because there’s no longer any traffic to drown them out.
Personally, though, I think the experts are wrong. If it weren’t for social distancing, they’d be very welcome to come and stay over at my house. Because I suspect they might change their minds, once they’d been subjected to the raucous cacophony of birdsong that erupts at ever more obscene hours each morning, seemingly within
inches of my bedroom window. I swear the birds never used to be this shrill, this rowdy, this deliriously hysterical.
Maybe my lack of sleep is making me paranoid, but I’m increasingly convinced they’re enjoying this. Celebrating our misfortune. Revelling in our pain.
One bird is particularly ear-splitting. I don’t know what kind of bird it is. But from what I can make out, it’s essentially a car alarm with feathers.
vIf you want a measure of how rapidly this crisis has spread, look at a newspaper from three months ago. In the January 18 edition of The Times, for example, the sole mention of coronavirus came in the foreign pages, in the “news in brief ” column.
“A second person has died in China from a mysterious virus that has spread to Thailand and Japan,” the story began. Directly below was a story from Germany about a chicken that had been eaten by a dog. The owner of the chicken had sued the owner of the dog for loss of earnings, because the chicken “had starred in a TV film and completed 10 hours of acting lessons”. The judge ordered the owner of the dog to pay €615 (£536) in damages.
The story about the virus was 63 words long. The story about the chicken was 72.