The crow is caw-cawing from her vantage point on the pebbled beach. She is staring hard, with black, beady eyes, in our direction. Miles away from her tree-top nest, her murderous crew are arriving in numbers. A savage bun fight for territory and scraps ensues, as the endless waves lap on the pebbled shoreline.
As the crows busily scare off the brassy seagulls, I am engaged, deep in fertile conversation with my teenage daughter, all about the IQ hierarchy of the native bird citizenry in Hove.
Pretty soon we have a sliding scale: from street pigeons, bottom feeders and dumbest of the dumb; to seagulls, lords of the sky and scavengers of the earth, a mid-table ranking in nature; and finally, crows, the sharpest of the sharp, carrion feeders and doom mongers of plagues, pestilence, and poverty.
My girl and I have found a chilled spot on the Hove beachfront. Away from the crowds. She gently whispers she can’t take the crowds anymore. Not since the very modern plague took a grip. Not since the enforced viral convalescence in homes up and down the country. She looks deep in my eyes and tells me she doesn’t feel normal. And I feign a veil of comfort, telling her that no-one is normal.
The crowds, though, are making the pilgrimage down to the waterfront, on this warm spring evening. A sweaty, cycling pack of Middle-aged Men in Lycra camp down on the pebbles, cracking open their tin. A circle of friends engages in lairy banter, as one caftan decked-out woman waits on everyone, pouring from a bottomless bottle of fizz. Dogs urinate and bark in the gentle breeze. The sun goes down over a bank of grey cloud, as the sea washes over the pebbles in white lace pools. Back and forth. Nature’s infinite metronome.
Studying our shadows, cast across the pebbles, we stumble over a rocky shoreline of a conversation, chinwagging about depression and sadness. Decked out black as the crows, with deep mascara lines highlighting her eyes, my girl confides she feels sad all the time. Drawing a sharp breath, moving on, she talks about friendship circles, what’s cool and what’s not, and demonstrates the hidden dark mode on my phone.
Back in the car, I have Radio 1 on too loud. She tuts and turns down the volume, preferring Heart to Heart. As she idly flicks through the stations, I wonder whether she has any genetic predisposition to rave and Friday evening’s ‘Essential Mix’. Annie Mac is playing a remix of ‘Power to the People’ and doing shout-outs. My girl tells me she can do me one on Insta, then in a heartbeat how she is going to hunt down Harry Styles, who is shooting a music video in Brighton over the forthcoming weekend. Next up, she is performing monkey tricks with her toes and a window squeegee. And then our time together is up, as she heads in the direction of her class.
The sun hangs low and orange in the west, as I silently observe the shredded cloud patterns above the million-pound, faded, property glory of Hove. I watch the crows, circling in numbers, disappear back to the roost, as I wait for number one son to surface. So, the offspring banter cycle begins again.
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