C’est La Vie En Rose
A Temple of Tranquillity, where the Soul of over-civilised Man may escape the thraldom of the Great Cities and find its Self alone with Nature and at one with God
Happy Friday-ish!
And a warm welcome from Thorpeness, Suffolk, a smugglers’ village that was re-designed from the sand up in 1910 by Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie, the son of a Scottish railway magnate. Ogilvie’s vision was for the village to become:
[A] Temple of Tranquillity, where the Soul of over-civilised Man may escape the thraldom of the Great Cities and find its Self alone with Nature and at one with God.
I’m sitting here in the hour after dawn, listening to birdsong, and watching my phone.
For the second time in my life, I have downloaded Merlin, a free bird identification app from Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
As everyone keeps telling me: Merlin is insanely good, using my phone to ‘listen’ for bird calls and flashing the screen when it identifies likely matches.
In the last half hour, Merlin has come up with twenty-three bird IDs.
I’m pretty sure some of them are false positives, surely, but, for me, it doesn’t really matter. By exploring the database, I can still learn what a coaltit sounds like, whether or not there ever was one footling and furtling in the bushes behind me.
This feels a lot like magic — not only because I personally have no idea what a siskin or a dunnock sound like (except perhaps a pair of Shakespearean insults), but also because of the speed at which Merlin works.
While writing just now, I was keeping half an eye on Merlin’s radar — magpie, chaffinch, robin — when I saw it pick up a greylag goose.
Now, I may be an idiot, but even I know what a goose sounds like and I couldn’t hear anything. Black mark for Merlin, I thought.
Then I looked up.
In the distance, and now here, over the houses, two teams of geese are sledging across the sky, all at once, here and above me. In the silence of a Sunday, I feel their wings beat the air.
How Merlin could detect these geese before my human ear, I’ll try not to wonder too much on — but I’m so glad that he did.
Time enough for me to stop writing, look up and, for a moment, marvel at this Temple of Tranquillity.
~
For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋 My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor and cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel.
On which note: THANK YOU to everyone who donated to support grassroots refugee solidarity projects after last week’s newsletter.
Money doesn’t just talk; it works.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes, rarely, I use technology to increase my sense of wonder at the universe. So thank you to Ed Yong and his newsletter for reminding me of Merlin’s existence.
Welcome to edition 373.
C’est La Vie En Rose
* Title credit: CW
Cycling long distances in the company of other humans has many benefits, but I think my favourite is how the movement, landscapes and conversation moulds the way our brains perceive the world.
Today’s little story comes from a realisation found in conversation, somewhere among the gentle hills of Magnesia and Pthiotis.
Why is it that the phrases ‘C’est la vie’, ‘That’s life’, and ‘It is what it is’ are only ever deployed, most often with a shrug, with reference to unlucky, unpleasant or undesirable events?
You miss your turning on the motorway: ‘C’est la vie.’
Your computer shows you the blue screen of death: ‘That’s life.’
The Tories are somehow re-elected: ‘It is what it is.’
I’m not arguing: that is life. It is what it is.
But I would argue that there is a lot more positive than negative in what it is. And we could all do with pointing that out to each other more regularly.
Growth in clean energy is in line with net-zero emissions by 2050: ‘C’est la vie!’
Your best friend gives birth to a beautiful human: ‘That’s life!’
Cyclists raise over £92,000 for grassroots refugee projects: ‘It is what it is!’ (😉)
More often than not, life does wear rose-tinted glasses.
The slow autumn sun rises over the trees, the wind rearranges the turning leaves, and a robin out calls to me: ‘C’est la vie, my friends, c’est la vie.’
That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading and I hope you’ve found something to take away with you. The next edition should see a return to our usual Friday schedule.
Big love,
dc: