Ubermen on Ice

It is not a song I would expect hear a busker sing, nor is it one I would expected to be rendered so perfectly. His voice echoes off the narrow, tiled walls of the tube station, audible long before we can see him. The verse he sings is about filling your lungs to anchor yourself and, as we emerge into the frozen crystalline sunshine, I hold on to the idea.

The cold hammers into me and I force air into my mouth. I can feel my teeth begin to freeze; tiny points of off-again, on-again pain – a symphony of ice-cream headaches. We walk a slow circle, the endless green grass and blue sky confronting after days of slate-grey London.

There are three kinds of geese here, and I watch a trio of the large grey birds waddle toward the green, the one in the middle aggressively weaving as it nips at the tails of the other two. “They move like dinosaurs,” I say, “or at least they move how I think dinosaurs would have moved.”

He turns and watches them make their way up the hill. “They move like we’ve been made to expect dinosaurs to move, by movies that probably modelled their dinosaur’s movements on birds.” I guess that’s as precise an answer as you’re ever going to get.

I turn back toward the lake and watch a father jump onto a park bench and begin to slow-dance, his three children trailing after him. “But why, Daddy?”

“Because that’s what birds do, ‘innit. They shit on things.”

Posted in Travel on Friday March 7, 2008.