Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Illegal Let, then Sublet and then Pay not even a Halfpenny of Rent!

Since we started laying rice-grain, ground glucose biscuits and clean water saucer on our terrace, we have been visited by many birds. We have now counted a few generations of sparrows. And I recognize at least two crows. (I wish I were as healthy as them!)

In one of the most beautiful essays I have read, George Orwell writes:

"Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of
London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I  have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road.  There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent"


('Some Thoughts on the Common Toad', 1946)


 Artist: David Sipress, The New Yorker, November 2012