An Exercise

The Exercise.
Write down five sounds that you can hear. Then list the things that you associate with those sounds. (Bell & Magrs 2019*)

Five sounds heard while sitting on the balcony.
A pigeon.
The Wind.
Traffic Noise.
A car horn.
Unseen voices.

A pigeon.
A sound that has two quite conflicting connotations. Firstly, last night’s dinner, pigeon (Wood Pigeon) breasts on a warm mushroom and spinach salad with a blueberry vinaigrette. Secondly, the menace of the flying rat that is the bane of the urban environment, and with which we have an ongoing battle to keep away from our balcony.

The wind.
The sound of the wind sparks reminiscence and nostalgia. It transports me back to earlier, even childhood, days in Cornwall. It stirs memories of being beside the sea, sitting on a rock watching and listening to the symphony of sounds associated with a beach or harbour, and once more bringing those sounds clear in the mind.

Traffic noise.
Right now this is a sound very much associated with frustration. Why frustration? Well, I associate traffic noise with the urban environment, and cities in particular. This brings to mind some of my favourite cities, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, Istanbul, Helsinki, to name but a few. For the greater part of my life in Cornwall travel was not an imperative, but the last two decades away from Cornwall has given me a taste for travel. Now this is where the ‘frustration’ comes into play, sitting on the balcony hearing the traffic noise is a reminder of the present inability to travel.

A car horn.
Takes me back a very long way, to sixteen in fact, and memories of my first love - and no, it wasn’t alcohol. The young lady concerned was twenty one, yes, she was a cradle snatcher. I guess that I was aware of her for quite a while as she supported the local cricket team that I played for back then. After one of the matches she asked me, much to the annoyance of other team members, if I would like to go to the pub with her, of course I would - my introduction to alcohol. Well, we quickly became ‘an item’, and she used to pick me up most evenings in her mini. She used the horn, as she drew up outside, to send me a message in Morse - no, I am not telling what that message was.

Unseen voices.
In some ways this again has connotations of frustration. The problem is that I am an inveterate people watcher, and like nothing better than to sit in a public place, preferably my natural habitat (the pub), watching and listening to other people’s conversations - something impossible right now under lock down.

* Bell J., Magrs P. eds, The Creative Writing Coursebook, Macmillan, 2019.