Thursday morning, and the radio was on while my wife was busy with something or other. “Coming up at nine-o-clock,” intoned the presenter, “is In Our Time, and here’s Melvyn to tell us what’s happening.” Melvyn Bragg’s voice has, over the years, changed a little. Sometimes he sounds a little muffled these days. “This morning we’re talking about…” Melvyn mumbled something. “A sack of Romans?” Queried my wife.
…
“Did he just say ‘a sack of Romans’?” She asked me, as I sat at my desk. I didn’t answer, because I was altogether transfixed by a news story that I’d found.
“This is an amazing story,” I say. “About a woman who heals animals with her mind.”
“Really? What’s her name?” My wife knows a lot of people, although so far as I know she isn’t friends with any animal faith healers - evidently she thought differently.
“You won’t know her, she lives miles away.”
“Ah, ok.”
“Apparently she talks to them too, by means of telepathy. So far she has helped some dogs who are sad, presumably they were sad but are now much less sad. Also some cats who were worried, and a crow who was feeling upset! It doesn’t say what the crow was feeling upset about, though. Which is a shame really.”
“Perhaps it was upset about a sack of Romans.”
I paused for a moment to consider whether a sack of Romans would upset a crow, I didn’t think so, but then I had previously considered crows to be rather phlegmatic creatures. Not any more.
What does a cat worry about, I wondered. The economy? The state of the NHS? The impending US election? Sir Lindsey Hoyle? Gaza? Probably other cats, I concluded.
“Apparently she also helped a pheasant who was hurt,” I said. Again, the nature of the hurt was not immediately obvious, I wondered if it may have been physical, or it may have been emotional.
I began to wonder who would call in a spiritual healer to treat a pheasant, a bird that is traditionally reared simply to be shot at. The mental health of a pheasant hasn’t been something that many people have cared about, especially when such services command a fee of £65.00 an hour.
Perhaps, I thought, the cat was worried about who would pick up the bill for it’s therapy. And anyway, who has a pet crow these days? Presumably only vagabonds and magicians.
I read on, remembering a man who used to wonder around Grimsby town centre, drunk, with a live pigeon in his inside jacket pocket. Sometimes he’d stop cars and show people the pigeon. Funny how that seemed normal at the time, I thought.
I continued to read on.
“Ah! She spotted the pheasant and it told her it had a sore leg. Funny really, there’s not all that much to a pheasant’s leg… I wonder if she thought to warn it about people with guns, or if she just left it to find out later.”
The crow had a similar story, evidently the healer had seen the crow behaving strangely and communicated with it. It told her it had been ‘displaced’.
“It actually does say what the crow was upset about, it was upset about being displaced!”
“Crows have a surprisingly sophisticated vocabulary, then,” my wife said.
“Apparently so. And a remarkably complex inner life.”
I considered the idea of crow feeling melancholy and complaining of displacement as I drove to see some people. I saw a pigeon on a branch, it looked sort of listless and aimless. ‘Do you have a sense of ennui?’ I attempted to ask it, telepathically. One of us wasn’t getting through to the other.
“This morning on In Our Time we’re talking about the Sack of Rome in 1527,” said Melvyn Bragg through my car radio.
Communication is a strange thing. Sometimes when we think we’re listening, we only really hear what we want to hear. Really listening to people involves not just hearing what they have to say, but being attentive to what they are communicating behind what they have to say.
A passing crow fixed me with a beady eye, I decided not to ask whether it had any particular concerns.