2008 - The Bearded Tit by Prefers to remain anonymous, Rory McGrath Page B

is a word I’ve somehow managed to do without for most of my life, but now I use it as often as I can.
    ‘Was that a frantling, darling?’
    ‘No, it was the phone.’
    ‘Oh, I thought the peacocks were at it again!’
    But one of my favourite words, which is not from the world of birds but is one I will always associate with birds, is a word I’m afraid I cannot remember.
    I’ve got a feeling it ends with something like ‘—asthaenia’ or ‘—esthenia’. Anyway, it’s one of those Greek medical words you only ever hear on University Challenge and which no one knows. Paxman reads the definition out with a sneering ‘tut’ as if it’s a word he’s known since he was three. It means, roughly, a psychological dysfunction that causes the sufferer to confuse the senses. So, basically, you hear things you should see and see things you should hear. You taste or smell sound or colour. Any reader who’s got very stoned, lain in the back garden on a sunny day with headphones on and listened to Tangerine Dream will know what I mean.
    I always remember that word, which, as I say, I can’t actually remember, when I see or hear a skylark. Especially somewhere in the flatlands of the Cambridgeshire-Norfolk border. It’s a favourite place of mine. The first time I was there is unforgettable. I still find the memory unsettling.
    It was a soaking day in February. The dark-white light of rainy sky and black earth made it hard to look out of the train window. I went back to the crossword. I was travelling from Peterborough to Cambridge, via Ely. The railway line arcs to the east then to the south and then to the west, bisecting the flattest land in Britain with a sodden semi-circle. This is a drowning land, a sinking land. The landscape is scarred with the history of man’s efforts to keep it from the sea. The twenty-foot drain. A disturbingly dead-straight channel nearly twenty feet wide and nearly twenty miles long. Ditches and canals intersect at unnatural right angles, glaring perpendiculars in the dark peaty soil. At the beginning of the journey the twelfth-century Norman bulk of Peterborough Cathedral recedes into the drizzle; at the end of the journey the ghostly galleon of Ely Cathedral looms towards you out of the drizzle. In between, an impossibly low horizon makes it a land of sky. It feels like a journey through the Dark Ages, a journey on the edge of the known world.
    Somewhere in the middle, I looked up from the paper and out of the window. It was a shock. I held my breath. The train was out at sea. Water joined the white sky in a continuous sheet of glass.
    I looked again. For a second I was frightened.
    No, wait.
    There’s a tree out there in the ocean.
    Another one.
    A hedge. The land had drowned. These are the Ouse Washes. The Great Ouse river regularly floods the surrounding land, which is so flat it disappears. To the uninitiated, it is a profoundly disturbing landscape. But it makes a great piece of natural wetland, which brings in the birds and the watchers all year round.
    That was my first time in those wetlands. The next time was on a hot summer’s day.
    It’s different.
    So, so different.
    Another-planet different.
    I was in a huge meadow near Welney in Cambridgeshire. I felt as if there was nothing between me and the sun. Not even Mercury and Venus. The scorched earth gave no shelter. There was just the sweltering sky. I lay down on the grass. The intensity of blue weighing down on me.
    I was alone with the heavens. Alone but for a bird. A very special bird. A bird that is not of this world. It descends from heaven to nest and then disappears again into the void. A skylark. A skylark singing without pause for what seemed like hours. A small, nondescript brown bird had flown high enough to be invisible to the naked eye and poured out its music. Oh, yes, and that word. That’s when I thought of that word I couldn’t remember. Something-esthaenia. Mixing up the senses.
    I imagined each note of the