The Birds

"Yes, this is a play called The Birds , written by the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, who lived in the 5th century BC. He wrote this play in the middle of the great war that was then going on between Athens and Sparta, and it’s about how the birds occupied a middle kingdom between earth and heaven and negotiated deals between the two realms. They are approached by two Athenians, who were fed up with high taxes and bureaucracy in the city and wanted to get a bit of an escape from it. So they went to the birds, as a guide to a better way of life. The birds are being used in an allegorical way, of course. “It’s the first example of how birds can become symbols for us, and birds do become symbols for us in all sorts of ways: you’ve only got to think, in America, of the national bird, the bald eagle.” It’s not only a very amusing story, it’s the first example of how birds can become symbols for us, and birds do become symbols for us in all sorts of ways: you’ve only got to think, in America, of the national bird, the bald eagle. You see it everywhere – on flags, postage, the currency and buildings, it is the emblematic bird of the United States. And the story of how it was chosen to be the National Seal of the United States is one I deal with in my book. But the notion of birds as symbols goes all the way back to Aristophanes, and he’s on my list as the origin of that interest. I think it’s because we’ve always had this feeling that birds have a freedom that we don’t have, because they can fly. Flight and movement is one of the key things in our attraction to birds. Birds occupy this area, in his play, between heaven and earth, which plays on the fact they have this freedom and mobility that human beings lack. And that’s also why they crop up in dreams, as well as in nightmares – as Alfred Hitchcock very well realised in conceiving his terrifying film The Birds. I think it’s their airiness that makes them so important to us. Yes, The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White is a series of diaries he wrote in the 18th century, and it’s said to be the fourth most published book in the English language after the Bible, Shakespeare and one other (which I think is probably John Buchan). It’s an absolute evergreen classic, there are a tremendous number of different editions of it, and if you go into any bookshop with a natural history section you’ll find it. I think people are just attracted by the simplicity of the diary approach, what he sees and finds every day. White, like John Clare, is a superb observer – he just wrote down exactly what he saw and so helps us to see it too. It’s a very simple form of prose, but it’s got an enduring appeal. It was published in 1789. The genre of nature note is a very attractive one to a lot of people. It’s got a seasonal appeal. Gilbert White writes about his excitement when the first swallow arrives in his village, and reminds himself what time they came last year, and wonders where they’ll be nesting this year. There’s an awful lot of stuff in newspapers and on television about all this kind of thing – birds are markers of seasons for us and people listen to hear the first cuckoo, for example. In my village where I live in Suffolk, come the middle of April, people stop me in the street. They don’t stop to ask if I’ve heard that Michael Jackson has just died, or that the stock market went up today: they ask, ‘Have you heard the cuckoo yet?’"