THE GOOD PELICAN

IT'S ALL LOVE

So here I am, three weeks in.  I asked you to be gentle with me and you have been, not just by subscribing but by writing sympathetically to me.  Thank you.  Novelists wait so long to get responses to their words that they don’t always recognise the words being responded to.  ‘Did I write that?’ they wonder.  ‘When?’  How gratifying it is, therefore, no sooner to write than to hear your words resound, to know there’s someone out there, enjoying what you’ve written.

My offering this week is a love poem of sorts.  Pelicans hold more than a fascination for me.  They are a promise of something, though what I cannot say.  A different world, maybe.  Baudelaire saw the poet as an albatross, a prince when high among the clouds, clownish and ugly when exiled on the earth. I see the novelist as a pelican – of no apparent use, of confused intention, of doubtful grace and, though capable of taking to the skies, never entirely comfortable until he’s up there gliding.  The pelican is of another time, quite possibly a mistake, a blueprint for an idea of creation the Creator decided, at the last minute, not to go ahead with.  At once exquisite and droll, his giant wings make comical his walking. Or, in my case, getting out of a taxi, climbing a steep flight of stairs, or dancing.

Strolled to St James’ Park the other day to check on the pelicans.  Because St James’ Park is bounded by Buckingham Palace and Whitehall you see strange sights there - Ministers of State buttoned into morning suits on the hottest days of the year, men in top hats and women in feathery fascinators trooping to the Palace to collect their knighthoods and damehoods.  So pelicans are hardly out of place.  There are six of them currently in residence – Isla, Gargi, Tiffany, Sun, Moon, and Star.  I can’t pretend to know which is which and I wouldn’t presume to address them familiarly if I did.  Though not averse to public attention (one of them sometimes joins me on a park bench and poses for photographs), they have a stately and even haughty demeanour - as though they know they’re in a RoyalPark - that repels intimacy.  You can’t suppose, just because they’ll snuggle up to you on a bench, that they’re looking for a friend.  If anyone is hoping for more from the relationship, it’s me.