23 MARCH 1985, Page 38

Postscript

Enfeebled

P. J. Kavanagh

Driggishly, smuggishly (there should be 1 such a word, meaning not quite smug- ly) I was staring from the train window while my acquaintance opposite chatted on, staring at me. It was an early spring evening, birds were silhouetted in bare trees as they settled to roost and the Thames flashed back the last of the sun. Yet again I was wondering why, when we meet others by chance, we always have to talk. Could we not have stared out of the window together, companionably, instead of searching our heads for topics? Besides, I had been wanting to read, and doze; was not in fact feeling too good. Anyway, it is my unsociable conviction that we don't look out at the world enough, and seem to prefer looking inwards, at each other, at ourselves. So I found self-Satisfaction, while the anecdotes poured towards me, in projecting myself 'elsewhere, towards the birds and the darkling fields. Ha! I should have known better . . . .

Perhaps it is the use of self-con- gratulation that the moment we indulge in it we find ourselves flat on our faces. For within a very short while of that one-sided conversation I was shivering and juddering and groaning, the very thought of a cold field was horrible to me, and I lusted for indoor things like aspirins and blankets and someone to groan at.

Response to the natural world, it seems, is not a moral imperative but depends on health. So, perhaps all my criticisms of talkative others were only the result of my previously fortunate condition and they, poor things, were in a semi-permanent state of near-influenza? It is possible; certainly it is no good telling a man with a temperature to look out of the window, or a man who is too unhappy: All this long Eve, So balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky And its peculiar Tint of Yellow Green And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye!

Dejected Coleridge knew the psychic prop of nature could be withdrawn, and that the deprivation was terrible: 'I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.' That is certainly one of the consequences of influenza; it is a minor ailment, certainly, but we do not think so at the time, because we cannot be sure the 'feeling' will ever come back.

Spring has been happening here, but for all it meant it might have been taking place on another planet. However, STC also said that nature never did betray the heart that loved her, so one must hope. Birds may be the answer. They seem to behave with special consideration to the enfeebled. There is the chaffinch, for example, that has tried to get into the room all the time I lay in bed. He pecked at the window so hard and constantly that he blurred it with his beak or with oil from his feathers so there was a round stain on it as on a British Rail headrest. Presumably he was trying to drive away his own reflection but he managed to divert some gloomy'ones of my own. Later, as I painfully tottered past a low bush, a gold-crested wren presented to me the double-parting pattern on the top of its head and did not even fly away when I stopped and peered down, as surely it would have done had I been brisker. Perhaps birds don't feel too good, some- times, themselves. Yesterday I rescued a greenfinch trapped in a shed and when it perched on my finger there was a sensation of cold so intense I thought some ice had rolled from its feathers onto my hand. But no, it just had astonishingly cold feet. In this week's local paper there is an account of a German boy in Cirencester whom all sorts of birds have been seen to perch on. The boy is blind, and it does sometimes seem that when we humans are in full health and have all our faculties we are altogether too hearty for the rest of crea- tion.