I feed the crows

Being a body, Crouch End, corvids, cake, and EMDR therapy.

A walk with crows when I lived in London, a few years ago.

Left out of the front door, a sheepish glance at the pair of magpies that rapped on my window this morning. I’ve been leaving monkey nuts on the outside windowsill for them, and just when they got used to being fed daily, I'm all out. They’re busy taunting the neighbour’s fancy-pants cat now, this is surely the delinquent behaviour of hungry birds.

Stop at the shop to restock on nuts for my corvid pals, plus coke and crisps for me. The shopkeeper and I have the same conversation that we do every Tuesday morning; he asks why I’m not at work, I tell him it’s my day off, he looks unimpressed. Because I need his approval, I tell him I worked 12 hours yesterday. “I worked longer”, he replies. There’s no way I can win this competition, unless I take over his shop and keep it open an hour longer than he does every day, something I’m considering. I put my stuff on the counter and he tells me it’s going to cost hundreds of pounds, I make a shocked face and he laughs, then I tap my card and our little dance is over until next time.

Down the steps here to the remnants of a railway platform. This used to be the line between Finsbury Park and Alexandra Palace but they lifted the tracks up in the 70s and now it’s a long, thin nature reserve. Runners charge up and down where the trains were running 50 years ago, couples bimble along with their yappy little dogs, and cyclists with baskets and tinny sounding bells ride past.

Past the arches, where the Spriggan sculpture is ready to leap out at you from a corner. Ever since I moved to Crouch End I’ve seen tributes graffitied across the bricks here. RIP K-bag, RIP Lover, RIP Trip, 3 young men who were killed by a freight train at Loughborough junction in 2018. The gorgeous, dizzying smell of spray-paint is the eternal base note of the perfume of the Parkland Walk. The other notes change with the seasons; wild garlic, blackberries, elderberries, vape pens, skunk. Nobody seems to smoke hash anymore, has it gone out of fashion?

Right here, by a tree covered in graffiti, this is where I bump into the guy I used to date a million years ago, the one with the clammy hands. He’s walking hand in hand with a woman I assume is his girlfriend, but she could be his wife. I find this bit agonising whenever I bump into anyone I know, the walk towards each other not knowing where to look. I plan a breezy “Hi”, then I’ll carry on walking, not even take my headphones out. It’s nothing personal, I just really hate bumping into anyone.

Overcompensating for my discomfort I go for full on eye contact, maybe it’s a little confrontational, but clammy-hands shuffles past me, silently looking at the ground. I wonder how many times I’ve been out with someone I’m romantically involved with and they’ve silently walked past women whose skin they know the taste of. His posture hasn’t improved since the last time I saw him, he’s always walked like he’s sorry about everything. In fact one of the reasons it didn’t work out between us was that I moved my body through the world with too little apology and he moved his with too much.

I hit the 1 mile mark as I cross the bridge over the railway tracks and into Finsbury park, beeline from there to an oak tree that has made a seat for me at the base of her trunk. This is my crow feeding spot, right between the boating lake and the basketball court.

I whistle. I’ve been trying to work on a melody that I can remember and stick to, a tune that says “HEY CROWS, GRUB’S UP”. What comes out is something like the whistle from the old Linda McCartney kiev adverts, the first thing I ever learned to whistle. Whistle first, then toss a peanut onto the concrete path. Soon they will learn to drool at the first note of this whistle, but for now I have to rely on one of them noticing me and my clumsy nut toss.

It’s not only Tuesdays that I come here to feed the crows, it’s any day off work, late start, or early finish. I want to spend all my free time with them. It’s worth every penny I’m spending on peanuts, walnuts, and almonds.

I love the stories of garden crows that bring gifts to the people that feed them daily. I love the stories of whole murders of crows dive-bombing the people they have grudges against equally. I don’t need their gifts, and I don’t crave their wrath, but the thought that feeding them might mean I am in a crows thoughts is thrilling to me. Maybe they wonder where I am on the days I don’t turn up, maybe they wonder why I’m not at work on the days I do.

I like observing the social hierarchy of the birds, the literal pecking order. They seem to have a very keen sense of what is and isn’t fair, and if one crow takes too many nuts they’re at risk of being attacked by the others. I can’t deny that some animal part of me is excited when I witness them scrap, but despite this I do my best to keep the peace between them. I know when to throw and where to throw (as much as my terrible aim will allow) their food to keep the big birds away from the runts and I try to make sure all the crows get at least one nut each.

There are two crows I am especially fond of, Balthazar and Dave. Balthazar is missing almost all the feathers from his head, which gives the impression that the rest of the feathers are a glamorous cape he has opted to wear. Dave is the bravest of all the crows, at least when it comes to approaching me. He sidles up a few inches away, head cocked with curious eyes, then grabs a nut and darts away to crack it open on a branch. He even checked up on me when a goose got too close for comfort once, the curious look in his eyes replaced with concern. Glamorous Balthazar and brave Dave both get extra nuts sneaked¹ to them.

I brought two Hinge dates here in the summer, Greg the bald artist and Patrick the milk drinker. There were two reasons I brought them here, one saner than the other. Reason 1 is that I figured that even if they were boring or annoying, I’d still get to hang out with the crows. How bad can any date be if you spend it with birds? The other is that I hoped they would act as auguries, let me know if they disapproved.

Greg the bald artist flung a single Jammie dodger for the crows, one caught the biscuit before it even hit the ground and flew off with it stuffed in his beak. Greg gave nothing to the other birds, though they were all looking at him expectantly. I did explain to him that this wasn’t good for crow on crow relations, or for their general nutritional needs, but he didn’t seem to care. Patrick brought nothing for the crows. I did not need the birds to caw no at me from the treetops for either of them.

When I leave my spot at the tree I toss a few nuts behind as I walk, and a faction of the crows follow me as I go. Any close-up witnesses would know what I suspect in my heart, that it’s only cupboard love, but maybe from a distance it would look like there are 7 crows that can’t bear for me to leave the park.

There’s the bowling green to the left where I once saw a crow hanging from what appeared to be a shoelace noose, and then convinced myself I must have been seeing things, because what kind of monster would do something like that? Surely not a boules player.

Out of the park, past the amateur tightrope-walkers and the man who lets his bees sting him as a form of communication, and across the road. Down more steps to walk along the New River Path, a narrow footpath next to a 17th century aqueduct. Scurry along there like a river rat, because I spent too long with the crows and I can’t be late for therapy. I have no time to watch the coots and moorhens, no time to look for a heron hiding in the reeds, no time to tut at people throwing whole loaves of cheap white bread into the water, and no time to be stuck behind dawdlers walking three abreast.

Here, just by the wetlands, before I turn onto the road, there’s a spot where I saw two men throw a brick at a mallard with her ducklings in the summer. I lost my shit, screamed at them, demanded to know why they’d do such a thing, but didn’t give them any time to answer before I yelled more. All rage, no sense. In my mind crows plucked out their eyes and bees stung every inch of them, and they begged for mercy on their knees. In reality, the more passive of the two men held the other back when he went to attack me, and so he kicked a bin over instead then fucked off.

I’m a moth to a flame with opportunities like that, chances to let out the scrapper with the saviour complex.

I do my best to arrive a couple of minutes early to therapy, because I’ve calculated that climbing the endless flights of stairs that lead from the front door to his home office can cost me £1.50 of our allotted time. One hour of therapy costs me 5 hours of work and I don’t resent paying that, my therapist is worth every pretty penny, but I want to spend each minute I’m paying for on ‘the work’.

There’s a bookshelf just before the last few stairs, and every week when I walk past I peek at the spines and try to commit a new title to my memory. The books get squirreled away in a mental space, next to the brand of oat milk he once told me he likes, and the shampoo and shower gel I see in his bathroom when I inevitably have to use the loo at the end of our session. I’m gathering evidence that he is mortal, proof that he’s just an ordinary man rather than some kind of magician.

His face is still grazed and bruised from falling off his bike a week ago. The grazed bits have the same effect as when he blushes or (much rarer) cries a little, they make me want to protect him. They are also more proof that he is mortal, clumsy too. He has an objectively good looking face, but there’s a softness to the way he looks so that if you were going to paint him you’d have to use watercolours, heavy on the water. His voice and general presence are the same, even the clothes he wears; soft, safe, fuzzy. Linus Van Pelt’s blue blanket come to life.

I feel compelled to tell him that I’m only wearing this sundress because I think it might be the last warm day of the year, that I didn’t dress up for therapy. We could spend a whole session on the dress though, and it would mean would mean discussing the religious man I walk past on my way to therapy every week, it would mean discussing my little rivalry with god, it would also mean discussing transference. I expect when I’m ready to discuss both transference and god we’ll do some big, meaty work, but I’m not there yet.

Last weeks session was dominated by where falling off his bike led us. He didn’t need me to tell him why that held special significance, why it was a bit on the nose. I had told him I was concerned about him dying, or finding some other equally sneaky way to abandon me; referring me out, or deciding to quit the profession. I did not say “you can’t ride your bike, it’s too dangerous in London”, I also did not say “you should only exist on Tuesdays when I knock on your door, and when I leave you should go into a stasis booth until my next session”. I did say “I hope you wore your helmet”, same look on my face as the shopkeeper when he asks why I’m not at work.

It was a friend of a friend who told me about EMDR. She said she had only needed one session and it fixed her relationship with food, made her lose 2 dress sizes and permanently keep the weight off. Now she was totally trauma free and a size 10. I was intrigued by this get slim quick scheme, but it wasn’t until I read Bessel Van Der Kolk’s ‘The body keeps the score’ that I figured this might be the therapy modality for me, to make my body a safer place rather than a smaller place.

In our first session he asked what I wanted out of therapy. My reply could have been a prayer, could have been a joke, but he did not laugh or make any promises. He took an inventory of memories and issues and fissures and gaps where memories should be, got me to rate the intensity of feeling about them on a 1-10 scale, and told me how long he thought it might take to work through them (longer than one session).

Here I am. Here I am in the room, in the chair, in my body. I’m ready with a memory to work on. The intensity score has gone up for almost every item on my list since we first started, he assures me this is part of the process, that they’d been too low at the start. They were shoved away in a suitcase that I was unwittingly dragging around before, but now I need to dress up in my old pains if I want to really shed them the right way.

I give my number, then tell him where I feel it in my body, how I feel it in my body, and what belief goes with it. He raises his arm, and waves his magic wand; a BIC biro he uses to take notes, the very pen I once watched him write a single word with and then furiously circle it 3 or 4 times. The pen goes from side to side, and I follow it with my eyes. This is the first part of EMDR, the Eye Movement before the Desensitization and the Reprocessing.

We stop and he asks what’s the number now, where do you feel it, what does it feel like? My chest, my thighs, my feet. Sometimes it’s hot liquid moving through me, sometimes my mouth dries up and my voice leaves the room as a flurry of moths, sometimes I jolt so much you’d think the chair was electric.

If there’s a memory that’s going to take a few sessions to work through we have to put it away at the end of the hour, keep it in a container until the following week. First I have to pick a song and then as we listen I blink in sets of 3 to shrink the feelings down to a manageable size. Blink and then tap my legs with my hands. Left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg, blink blink blink. I don’t know how this works, why it works, or even if it works or if it’s just that I choose to play along.

After the blinking and shrinking I have to tell him what I’m storing the memory and feelings in, what container I choose.

The bits of therapy that feel like play are the bits when I wonder most about his other clients, am I doing it wrong or are they also agonising over their song choice, transforming into sentient monster trucks, elbowing their inner children off cliffs, and trying to store their memories in imaginary tupperware? He’s worried a plastic lunchbox might not be sturdy enough, so we toss the tub into a shipping container (his suggestion, I bet another client came up with this) and throw the shipping container in the sea (my suggestion, I am one-upping this other client) just before our time is up.

Who knows if it’s left or right out of the front door, my body almost always walks me down the road to Whole Foods before my brain has caught up with me.

I know it might not seem it by the fact that I’ve calculated the cost of walking up his stairs, but on Tuesdays money doesn’t matter as much as it does on other days. I’ve started picking up overtime, 6 hours extra a week so I can pay for therapy and a very overpriced piece of cake afterwards. I would steal it if I could, I would feel ethically okay about stealing from Bezos-owned (he makes at least 230,666 x what I do per hour) Whole Foods. I would feel okay about pickpocketing Bezos too. But I don’t have the skills to do it, and I think I’d feel embarrassed if I was caught. I’m not a blusher, but I reckon my whole face would burn up.

I take the cake, take a kombucha cola that I won’t enjoy anywhere near as much as a diet coke, take a new bag of nuts that cost twice the price and didn’t come with a dumb joke, and turn right out of Whole Foods, up to Abney Park cemetery.

Abney Park is a garden cemetery and arboretum full of headless stone angels and wonky gravestones covered in ivy. It’s one of 7 massive cemeteries in London that are referred to as ‘the Magnificent Seven’, built to deal with an overflow of bodies in the 19th century. I make my way to the Commonwealth War Memorial, a stone structure built above catacomb vaults in the centre of the cemetery, and place lines of peanuts down on two parapets, and around the base of the Cross of Sacrifice.

The crows of Abney Park are shyer than my Finsbury Park friends, and hang out in couples rather than whole murders. They’re skittish graveyard goths, and fly away leaving perfectly good peanuts behind if a jay or magpie appears on the scene. The pecking order is different here.

I have to pretend to be disinterested as I eat my cake and drink my mediocre cola, act like I’m not crazy about all the corvids. I’ve left an offering for the gods (organic nuts, on the altar of the Commonwealth War Memorial), and if the gods want to turn up that’s up to them, but they can’t see me looking for them. I take a book from my bag, a book helps with the ruse. I pick what I read here with great care, it has to be something that will make the birds think I’m nearly as smart as them. Hopefully they don’t notice that I’ve been stuck halfway through this book on epigenetics for months now.

Peering over the top of The Epigenetics Revolution, I watch the jay as she sizes up the peanuts, works out which ones are worth taking. This involves picking up each peanut in her beak, giving it a shake and working out how heavy it is. Jays have a reputation for being shy birds, heard (screaming like a banshee) rather than seen, but this particular one is almost as forward as a robin. I reckon if I came here daily I could get her to eat out of my hand.

Without fail I manage to get lost every single time I try to leave the cemetery, I should probably be Hansel and Gretel-ing some of my peanuts on the way in. Time moves in a different way after therapy, takes on a more slippery quality for a 24 hours after, but I’m starting to think space might be in on this tricksiness too.

When I do find my way out, my body (also tricksy) leads me back into Whole Foods for a second time (to my shame) and right to the freezer section. The final leg of my journey, the return with the elixir, is a crowded bus home, with a tub of Pistachio ice cream in a paper bag.

1. I really hate the word sneaked. It should be snuck. I looked it up, it is definitely meant to be sneaked. I know I could write snuck, I could bring it back. I’m not brave like that. If Dave the crow was a writer he would have written snuck. This is a cowards footnote.