When I leave the flat on a summer’s evening at the end of April, the colony of house martins that live in the square are out hunting over the neighbourhood. I find a vantage point on the dock by the canal, set up my packable camping chair and settle in. It’s the first time I’ve come out with the sole intent of watching the house martins, who returned from somewhere south of the Sahara at the start of the month. They roam above the rooftops, little blue-black and white insect-hunters, chasing, chirruping and chatting.
Every ten minutes or so they swoop down into their mud nests in the eaves of the apartment blocks. Sometimes two, three, and four dive in low like fighter jets, all trying to fly into the same nest in sequence. When they’re in, they share a squabbling murmur. With who, I’m not sure. It seems too early for their fledglings.
Before long, the cacophony of noise in the neighbourhood makes it difficult to stay focused on the house martins. As soon as the temperature creeps past twenty in London, the whole place comes alive. This evening’s no exception.
A house music bassline and chatter carry up from one of the bars a few hundred metres down the canal. Conversations erupt into laughter from a group of adults playing on the swings and slide on the opposite bank. A cyclist freewheels down the towpath with a speaker warping a lilting guitar riff into the distance. Dogs bark, kids scream, coots holler. A motorbike revs in the distance, and the rolling clack and alarm of a jacked Lime bike comes in to stop in the square. My attention latches on to them all, each the subject of their own branching stories. I remind myself that mine is here with the martins this evening; an excuse to be outside for sunset.
Even though the sun’s out of sight behind the apartment block to my right, it still casts dazzling gold reflections off the windows in the square. A sunbeam funnelled between apartment blocks spotlights the buglife dancing above the bushes and shrubs rewilding the canalside. The warmth of the day is carried away in pieces by the breeze. A chirruping house martin returning to its nest draws my attention back to the sky and the silver blue light ascending unbroken up into space. I see the sliver of a new moon giving a tilted smile, then clock a neighbour smoking from his balcony who I suspect has been watching me watch the birds for a while.
Part of a written submission for Granta’s Writing Nature workshop, 2025.