erica viola

Parakeets In Winter

Winter in London is just an extension of autumn; the same slate skies, rain-wet leaves, and slick pavements that plagued us in October overstay their welcome into January, like tiresome houseguests. If you brave the cold and forgo the bus, your boots will be mud-scabbed by the time you squelch into the grocery store. January bores us. Christmas is over, condensed into kerbside bin bags packed with wrapping paper and empty mulled wine bottles. Cheery spirits cool, dampened by the threat of financial collapse and worldwide sickness.

In London Fields, the mossy park benches have been forsaken by nannies and their charges; now, only occasional exhausted joggers inhabit these sanctuaries. Dog walkers stride instead of amble, hurrying back to the comforts of radiators and steaming kettles and undiseased air.

The old year has flamed into the new, welcomed by a shower of half-hearted fireworks on the South Bank, but now we live and breathe unyielding sobriety. The grass is still defiantly green, but a carpet of dried leaves smothers it; we long for snowdrops. If you stand at the edge of the park, you will notice urban scavengers more clearly than you would in summer: enormous, cranky crows; stupid, waddling pigeons on a never-ending search for crumbs; magpies who look as if they could talk, if they chose to, but instead hop disdainfully away from you.

The sound of traffic tangled with voices is dimmed by trees and your own introspection. Everything is tired, lethargic; like springtime, you are waiting to begin. Then the parakeets arrive.

No one knows where they came from. Romantic rumour says that Jimi Hendrix released a mating pair before he left his flat in Mayfair in 1969. The less interesting and more sensible theory is that a flock escaped from a damaged aviary. Regardless, the ring-necked parakeets of London are both legends and as real as your frostbitten fingers. They are the city’s most treasured anomaly: glossy, emerald, imperious, with voices a thousand times larger than their frail bodies. They don’t know they don’t belong; their arrogance pushes the other birds into the background. The parakeets are wonders. Each is a bold miracle, evocative of warm weather, blue skies, and lazy-day picnics. They swarm the treetops, screaming into eternity.

The parakeets in London don’t remember their tropical  ancestors’ need for luxurious southern heat. Undeterred by temperature, smog, and hidden sun, they are a vital, pulsing mass; they are foreigners with an English pedigree, and they belong. When the parakeets are calling, silhouetted against the rising dusk, their very existence illuminates a shadowy world of endless uncertainty.