Well, here I am in Hania, and it has to said that it is extremely pretty. Turquoise waters, picturesque buildings, bright sun on stone walls; they’ve got the whole Mediterranean thing working well for them. I’m slightly antsy about getting some actual birding done, not least because my cunning plan to go to Omalos has been messed up by the fact the buses don’t start running there until May.
But I’m sure I’ll work something out. And I did see Griffon Vulture from the bus.
I’m in a Greek bar, watching football;
Giggs, Rooney and Ronaldo on the break
so fast and effortless
it almost seems like cheating.
Then at half time,
among the trailers for upcoming matches
in the Bundesliga and the NBA,
a slow-mo montage of Diego Maradona.
Mainly the fat Maradona;
waving to an screaming crowd,
singing with some chisel-cheekboned pop star,
waddling out onto a football pitch
in a tent-like no. 10 shirt,
his mouth and eyes reduced to creases in his face.
Does this mean he’s dead?
Or dying?
Perhaps they just think that it can’t be long now,
and want to advertise the wallowing
in grief, nostalgia
and self-righteous pity
as an upcoming attraction
for the fans.
It turns out the Heraklion Archaeological Museum is closed for renovations until July. Which is disappointing, because it holds a world-class collection of Minoan artefacts and I was looking forward to going there.
Oh well. Instead I got on a bus to Knossos, one of the sites where a lot of the stuff in the museum came from. Knossos isn’t the most evocative archeological site I’ve ever visited: too much reconstruction, too much concrete and too much scaffolding. But it was quite interesting to see it, and it was a nice sunny day, on and off, and there were hooded crows and collared doves and goldfinches and things around the place. Wood Warbler and Willow Warbler passing through on their migration north. Best bird was Italian Sparrow, which my field guide treats as a ‘stable hybrid’ of Spanish Sparrow and House Sparrow, but Avibase has as a full species. So it was either a half tick or a full tick for my life list.
After looking round the site I had a plate of chicken and chips and went for a birdy wander. Not that much around, but I saw Hoopoe, which is always a pleasure. There are lots of flowers everywhere. When I do the Blogger Bio Blitz, wherever that ends up being, there should be plenty to keep me occupied even if I don’t have a good bird day. That barn owl bio blitz button, btw, is derived from a photo on Flickr by Nick Lawes used under a by-nc-sa licence; the button is therefore available under the same licence. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Jennifer’s BBB buttons, but I wanted something to match my colour scheme.
Poems for the last two days; I haven’t written today’s yet.
Gatwick, 5am
Were Dante writing the Commedia today
he’d surely model one infernal circle
on 5am at Gatwick airport.
Well, maybe not. Even piped music,
sulry staff, strip lighting
and the vacant stares
of travellers only awake enough
to slowly masticate
a sandwich
are not as bad as being made
to swim in boiling pitch.
In fact, he’d probably admire
the palatial scale of it,
the cleanliness and stretches of sheet glass,
the light, the WH Smith stacked high
with printed books,
the clocks on sale
small enough to wear as jewellery.
To think the inconveniences of modern life-
the pharma-spam, the traffic,
the people using mobiles on the train-
are uniquely dreadful
is as egotistical as thinking
you are the pinnacle of human culture,
the culmination of a thousand years
or progress.
We may not have Dante or Botticelli;
we don’t have the Black Death either.
—-
Started out kind of jokey, ended up worryingly portentous. Oh well, that napowrimo for you.
#16 is a haiku-type thing:
Preparing for take-off;
skylarks.
I’m off to Crete tomorrow, and with all the packing and procrastinating I didn’t write a poem. And I have to get up in about 4 hours time [yipes] so no poem today. I’ll try to write two tomorrow— I have a longish flight to fill time on.
Posting may be sporadic in the next couple of weeks while I’m on holiday, although I expect I’ll pop into an internet cafe most days. I’m travelling on my own, so I’ll have the spare time. And I will try to keep up napowrimo, though obviously I may not be able to post all of them while they’re fresh.
Toodles.