Conversations with Strangers: The Possessed Budgie

July 28, 2014 ~ thomastyrrell ~ 6 Comments

One hot Saturday when I had nothing to do, I decided to see how far north I could get by hitch-hiking. Starting in Cardiff, I caught my first lift to Merthyr Tydfil with a property lawyer called Dai, then a very boring ex-infantry sergeant dropped me off outside Brecon, then a man from Hay-on-Wye dropped me off at the Talgarth crossroads, and then I got a lift from an American called Doug, who was getting extremely lost in the footsteps of William Wordsworth. (Somewhat to my surprise, I’ve turned up in his blog.) He was going to Bala.

I’ve never been to Bala, I thought. I might go to Bala too.

True to form, we took a wrong turn up the Elan Valley, and after several spectacular dams, reservoirs and mountain roads we wound up in Aberystwyth! Undaunted, we set off to the north-east, and Doug dropped me off in Bala town centre just after 6pm. I caught a lift out of town and camped for the night in a field three miles outside Bala, among caravans, campervans and behemoth tents set up to sleep whole families, where my little 35 litre rucksack, two man tent and miniature stove made me like Gulliver among the Brobingnagians.

Next day I walked for half an hour until I found a lay-by on the right side of the road and wrote where I wanted to go on my whiteboard – an invaluable hitch-hiking tool. It would have looked something like this:

Another half-hour passed waving my thumb fruitlessly at the sparse traffic, and I was just thinking of writing ‘Dolgellau’ on the other side of my whiteboard and trying to hitch both ways, when a car pulled in. Quite a nice one, I noticed, scrambling in. Roomy, with a couple of cool accessories like a waste paper bin strapped to the gearbox, and a dream catcher dangling from the rear view mirror – ornamental, since the car didn’t look slept in. The driver introduced himself as Joe. He was bald, with dark glasses, a voice that managed to be simultaneously gravelly and camp and various tattoos, most notable of which were the four Chinese dragons spiralling around his left leg, symbolising the elements of earth, air, fire and water. He was quite cagey about what he did, beyond mentioning that he was semi-retired, and I wondered at first if he was some kind of minor rockstar I ought to know about. He reminded me of a distant relative who was part of The Scaffold, now best known for Lily the Pink. We chatted for a while about old Clint Eastwood movies and silly hats, and some way down the road he told me he was a psychic medium, and was just returning from a weekend visit to another psychic medium in Dolgellau.

I wondered where to take the conversation from here. Some would rate mediums worse than con-men. I come from a sceptic background – my father was not so much a lapsed Catholic as one who was never convinced in the first place. Thanks to Dad (and Douglas Adams) I grew up as a stout materialist, an agnostic verging on the atheist, and without feeling any particular need for a spiritual dimension in my life. Then again, I had a lot of friends who believed wholeheartedly in a spiritual dimension; a great admiration for the stories of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, an occultist and a chaos magician respectively, and a determination not to offend my lift. Not that Joe seemed easily offended – in fact, he was a terrible tease.

‘So what do mediums talk about, when they get together?’ I asked, hoping for some professional gossip.

‘Dead people, mostly.’

‘Mmm.’ It would be crass, surely, to ask him if he’d communed with Elvis, or any well-known celebrities. ‘Do you have a good ghost story? Or is that kind of thing beneath you?’

‘I don’t have a ghost story, no. I do have a good possession story.’

Like any aspiring writer I listened eagerly, ready to plagiarise any gory details.

‘I got a call once from a woman down in Rhyl who had a possessed budgie.’

‘A possessed what?’

‘A possessed budgie. Now, just because I believe in the spirit world and the efficacy of certain essential oils doesn’t mean that my first thought wasn’t this woman is completely off her rocker. But I went down to Rhyl, and I met up with her and her husband in a car park – they were spiritualists like me – and they seemed perfectly sane. So I went back to their flat – perfectly ordinary place. The budgie’s tweeting away merrily in its cage, and the only odd thing was the stack of tapes in front of the TV.

“You can watch those, if you like,” said the woman. “They’ll back me up.”

What had happened is that her father used to own the budgie until he passed away, maybe a year ago. He’d always told her that when he’d passed on, he’d try and contact her, if it was possible, from the other side. The budgie stayed in her father’s flat for about three weeks while she sorted out the legacies, and then it came home with her. And about a week later, it started talking to her in her father’s voice.’

‘Can budgies talk?’ I asked, ‘I thought it was only parrots.’

‘No, budgies talk fine with a bit of training – so it was talking in her father’s voice, which wasn’t that surprising, but it was calling her by name, and it was saying things like “I told you I’d reach you, didn’t I?” Now you’re thinking he taught the budgie to say that before he died, aren’t you? So was I. But that wasn’t the whole story.

Maybe a month later, it started saying other things. Nasty things. Swearing at her, threatening her, telling her she was going to die. Really awful stuff. When she let it out of its cage it would start pecking her, dive-bombing her, attacking her.

I watched a few of the videos, and then I sat down with her and said that there might be an everyday explanation, but it could be that it was a negative spirit that had possessed the budgie and used her affection for her father and her belief in the supernatural as a way in. Once it had built up enough trust and affection to mess with her head, it started misbehaving.

“Why don’t you just shut the fuck up!” said the budgie. I jumped about a foot. It was the first thing it had said the whole time I’d been there. That pretty much settled it for us both.

She asked me what to do with it. I said throw it on the fire, but she wouldn’t do that, so I told her to give it away, but not to tell anyone about the negative spirit. Just say that it was your father’s, and you don’t want it any more. That way the spirit won’t have a psychological foothold, and won’t be able to bother anyone.

And that’s what she did.’

‘So someone in Rhyl still owns a possessed budgie?’ I asked.

Joe shrugged. ‘I guess so. It’s harmless, of course.’

Long after he’d dropped me off, I was trying to think of a rational explanation. Had the father planned the whole thing as a sick joke? Did the budgie learn the language off the TV? Was the husband, barely mentioned in Joe’s story, a more important character than he’d appeared? I loved the way the story sounded ludicrous at first, but built slowly to the point where you thought ‘yeah, I would be freaked out if this happened to me.’

Sadly, a quick google search revealed that Katey and Her Possessed Budgie, by Brian Curtin, has already cornered the market in the literature of the avian uncanny.

No, that is really a book.

I’ve got my own stories to write, in any case. But if you’re living in Rhyl, and your budgie’s head keeps turning 360 degrees on its neck and vomiting pea soup – you know who to call…

Conversations with Strangers: The Forager

July 24, 2014July 25, 2014 ~ thomastyrrell ~ Leave a comment

Since I started this blog in December 2013 I’ve written 50 blogposts and achieved 7300 views from all around the world, including Indonesia, Iraq and Vatican City. This would be the ideal point to look back, evaluate and reminisce, and such indeed was my original purpose, before I remembered how much I hate writing self-reflexive articles. True though it may be that the unexamined life is not worth living, I’ve never enjoyed doing it in front of an audience. I keep a journal for that, now well into its ninth volume, and woe betide he who peruses it without permission! So it is with some delight I have tossed aside my projected plan of discussing the motives that led me to begin blogging, complaining about how much I hate taking photos – the worst part of the blog – and trying to impose a retroactive rationale on a rattlebag of miscellaneous writing that incorporates anecdotes, poetry readings and academic conference reports, on topics as varied as astronomy, wild swimming, flying a glider, the Homeric translations of George Chapman and the embarrassments of taking a tramp home after a beer festival.

Instead, here’s an interesting conversation I had with a complete stranger.

… Over the bridge, a couple of people had vaulted the railings and were browsing on the blackberry bushes sloping down to the edge of the Taff, that mostly flows grey, brown or greasy green, but in these hot summer days had grown so clear that its rocky bottom was just visible through the weed.

– Found any juicy ones? I inquired, leaning against the railings.

The girl looked up. – They’re all a bit sour at the moment.

A green stripe varied the blonde hair that curved down her cheek toward her chin, and her bare bronzed arms were daubed with abstract colour, worked into her skin with the needle’s point, striped white also with the fainter mark of thorns. Her friend or boyfriend, with similar tattoos and a wild tangle of hair and beard, never spoke.

– Everything is coming into season about three weeks early this year, I observed, but even so I’d give the blackberries till the end of the month.

– Want to try one? she said, extending a purple hand. I picked the largest, dark, plump and softly bobbled; still my mouth filled with the familiar bitterness of a berry a few weeks under-ripe.

– No, not quite there. Have you ever tried making blackberry gin?

– We’ve done blackberry vodka.

– Does it still go that wonderful blood colour?

– Oh yes. Tastes great with cloudy apple juice.

– I like doing mine as a gin and tonic – then it bubbles upwards into a foaming glass of gore! I’m looking forward to laying in a stock for Halloween. Have you ever made nettle tea?

– No, but I made a chickpea and nettle curry the other day. It’s very versatile. I use it instead of spinach in a couple of recipes.

– Really? I’ve done it up with butter and pepper before, but it just tasted of pepper and butter. Kind of flavourless. Ah, just like…

-Just like spinach, yes. Bute Park’s a really good place for foraging. Her gaze roamed beyond me, upriver and down. There’s a big patch of elderflower over there. We made a ton of cordial. And there’s wild garlic and dandelion for salads.

She was eating up the rest of the blackberries from the palm of her hand as we spoke. Her friend or boyfriend found a little worm in his last, and threw it away. Then, not without awkwardness, they climbed back over the railings.

– See you when they come into season, I guess.

Ode to my study carrel

July 16, 2014July 16, 2014 ~ thomastyrrell ~ Leave a comment

Nothing is quite as exciting as having a new library to explore, and I’ve been granted access to some good ones of late – Chawton House Library, a women’s studies centre set in a house which once belonged to Jane Austen’s richer brother; the high shelves and Victorian stepladders of York Minster Library; dozens of beautiful old Carnegie Libraries from Clitheroe to Cathays; even the high Medieval surroundings of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, thanks to a Postgraduate Studentship and the fact my supervisor emailed ahead. Yet despite all their glorious architecture, surroundings, and selection, none of them have usurped that place in my heart reserved for the drab concrete outlines of Cardiff University’s Arts and Social Sciences Library, where I now have a small office to myself.

When I first applied for a study carrel I suspected that it was a word entirely invented by librarians – indeed, who better to do so? – but I made recourse to the OED and discovered that it is precisely the appropriate word for what it is – a small desk for private study within a library. Cardiff University’s Arts and Social Sciences Library boasts a row of eight on their second floor, which are given to MA and PhD students on 3-month rotas. Bute library may have the spiral staircases and the Science library the Victorian neo-classical flourishes – at least, before they stuck an entire unnecessary floor right through the middle of it – but none of them have anything so useful as the study carrels. At first glance, they maybe rather poky and predominantly brown, with a view of the Lidl car park, but such an opinion is sole preserve of the philistine who has not grasped the delight of having one’s own private space in the midst of a library. Safe behind my yale lock, I can actually stack my books in there without fear of some overzealous librarian returning them to shelf, leave my laptop or phone on the desk without fear that anyone might nick it and best of all, I can sit on the floor, or put my feet up on the desk, or roll into the footwell and doze off without anyone looking at me strangely. The view may not be the most sublime in existence, but mediated by the swaying birches and their million new leaves, it’s rather pleasant. Even then, it doesn’t take a lot of craning before I achieve a sightline across the thousand chimney tops of Cathays stretching out towards the Rhymney Ridgeway.

Cardiff University gave me access to my first university library, and after months spent scouring the secondhand bookshops of Winchester to build a poetry collection, I can still remember the thrill of discovering that they had collections by almost any author I could think of. I’d arrive, tap ‘Thomas Gray’ or ‘Gerald Manley Hopkins’ into the search engine, memorise the local reference and dash upstairs, chanting ‘PR4803.H44.A16.F80’ under my breath and hoping I’d get there before the rush. I often got my digits muddled up, but surprisingly enough, there’s yet to be a run on the literature shelves. The closest thing to it is when the first year essay titles are announced, and the shelves of Beowulf and Chaucer criticism empty as if by magic.

For there’s still magic among these dusty shelves, even in a warm day in May. Since my first days at Cardiff, I’ve studied in places as diverse as the British Library and the Bodleian at Oxford. Even York University library had more power sockets, comfier seats, continuous 24 hour access and a better DVD collection. I still keep up my self-initiated tradition of jogging up the stairs, however, and there’s still nothing I like better than when a likely tome catches my eye mid-stride, and I have to take it out and flick through it until the original book I was searching for is quite forgotten. Having my own little piece of it – however temporarily – is like having my own box at the theatre. Sheer class.

The Drunk Samaritan

July 1, 2014July 16, 2014 ~ thomastyrrell ~ 1 Comment

There’s a Philip Larkin poem (beautiful because true) to the effect that people make selflessness sound uplifting and inspiring and fulfilling, while in reality selfishness feels like sitting by the fireside with a good drink and good music and selflessness feels like hanging around a hospital waiting room in an ill-fitting suit. This will always be epitomised for me in the night I let a homeless man sleep on my floor.

I was behind the bar at the Great Welsh Beer Festival in Cardiff’s Millenium Stadium, familiarising myself with my stock like any good publican, while faithfully observing the prime directive of not drinking more than you serve – which wasn’t saying much, admittedly, on a busy Saturday evening. I was also somewhat maudlin, having just heard on the grapevine that a girl I used to love had moved in with someone I used to think of as my best friend. I haven’t seen either of them in years, admittedly, but I was having a bad week and the news threw me into a state of abject romantic self-pity. After the festival finished, I was walking home through the park at about 3am, when I blurted out something like ‘Ah me! I am a most unhappy man!’ Here I was accosted by a friendly drunk sitting on a nearby tree stump. He graciously offered me a can of Stella – not my usual tipple, but I never look a gift horse in the mouth – and we treated each other to a litany of our respective woes: romantic desolation and homeless alcoholism. We hit it off so well, in fact, that on finding out he had nowhere to sleep it seemed the most natural thing in the world to offer him a spot on my living room floor for the night.

‘This never really happens,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Can’t think why.’

I staggered back home beside him, fished out my sleeping bag and roll mat from behind the sofa, and left him to it.

Waking up the morning after a good night out, there’s always a pleasant few minutes in which to unpick dream from reality and filter out what memories the tides of wine, ale, and spirits haven’t washed away. It’s this that determines whether I’ll be chuckling over great wit, silliness and conversation for the rest of the day, kicking myself for being such a vulgar idiot, or merely scratching my head and wondering how I got home, or some other enigma. There’s one girl I still can’t remember if I kissed on a night out or if I merely dreamt I did. I’ve never had the courage to ask her which.

I put it to you, said my newly reawakened Reason, that you let a homeless stranger and professed alcoholic sleep on your living room floor.

Surely not, said I. Alcohol makes me a complete idiot, to be sure, but surely not that much of an idiot.

I put it to you, said Reason, that you go and see for yourself.

I peeked into the living room. There was a homeless guy sleeping on my floor. I gulped. And went to take a shower.

By the time I was washed and dressed my guest was awake. Rhys – for such was his name – was in his late forties, and surprisingly well dressed. He wore a shirt, a white jacket and light jeans, none of them stained, his hair was orderly, his chin stubbly but not beyond the bounds of fashion. Aside from the fact that he was drinking his first beer of the day at eight o’clock in the morning, you wouldn’t have looked at him twice.

‘Do you want any tea?’ I asked.

‘No thank you.’ he said. ‘Sorry about the beer, but I need it. I’m an alcoholic.’

I nodded sagely, and set about fortifying myself with earl grey, toast and marmalade, after which things would presumably become easier to cope with. Having offered him hospitality, the main problem was how to get him out of the house without being rude. I looked out at the thickening downpour barraging the patio. At least I’d saved him from waking up in the middle of it.

Rhys fixed one of my drawers while I ate my breakfast, and was thankful for the night’s rest. He did have a USB stick on which he insisted on showing me pictures of his daughter, but his daughter turned out to be surprisingly hot.

‘She has beautiful eyes,’ I said, diplomatically.

When I left for the university he left with me, and we went our separate ways. He thanked me again for my drunken generosity; I advised him to try and kick the alcoholism, but I doubt I had much effect. I haven’t seen him again.

I got back to my house later and tidied up. Nothing was missing, nothing was stolen. I did need to mop out the bathroom, because he was somewhat inaccurate – but who among us can claim to be faultless in this regard? In despite of having done my good turn for the day in true boy scout fashion, I felt embarrassed, uncertain and awkward, and I wouldn’t be stupid enough to do it again – but then I suppose that’s how everyone feels, all the way back to the good Samaritan and the man who fell among thieves.