For years, and for no good reason, my YouTube channel housed a three minute video called Stray Parrot in the Ferry. In this video, a small parrot sits beside a pair of wood pigeons on a telephone line above my neighbour’s garden. The video camera has auto-exposed for the sky, throwing the avian trio into silhouette. My inane comments fall silent about 30 seconds in, when I cut off the sound. The “Ferry” in the title refers to “Broughty Ferry”. It’s in Scotland, you know. I won’t say Broughty Ferry was a boring place. I’d never say that. But I will say that a naughty birdie on the wing felt, at the time, rather novel. Little did I realise that I would soon live beneath a nexus of the little goons.
I have some vague memory of learning, toward the end of my teens, that little green parakeets were colonising parts of London (or perhaps some more anonymous swathe of southern England, it was all mush at the time). I remember a BBC News 24 item on the matter, but cannot say with any real honesty where that viewing landed in the green parakeet sighting timeline I’m currently relaying to you.
Now look, I’ll be honest. My inner solipsist is much stronger than my inner archivist. Consequently I am a little prone to misfiling daydreams as memories, and vice versa. I’m not certain, for example, of how the BBC wished us to interpret these strange emerald visitations to the good gardens of England. Omens of our subtropical future. A critical mass of escapees gone native. A mere psyop, nought but a balm of whimsy, cultivated to soothe the economic lesions soon to be inflicted by our allegedly pig-molesting Prime Minister. Answers all entirely feasible.
At the very least, these little creatures are nobody’s daydream, not even mine. I’ve seen them. May this account be my testament:
First sighting: it was on a visit to London, around the same time as that BBC broadcast and the rise of Prime Minister Pigsby. He of the Ham. On that visit I saw a modest formation of the wee guys, gliding over a scenic spot on a river that I will boldly assume was the Thames – but not the bit from the news and the films. We were not anywhere near the centre. We were somewhere idyllic. There were some famous graves hidden away nearby. We were visiting my mum’s cousin, who I can disclose – without invoking MI5 surveillance – was an assistant for BBC Radio 2’s Sally Traffic (saintly, she revealed) and Terry Wogan (evil, she disclosed).
Fast forward to 2014, or thereabouts. Yours truly was living his third year away from home, in Manchester. Second sighting: one day, on a walk in Platt Fields Park (undertaken because in that era I possessed the time and sparsity of desire to wander about like the strange passive little man I was born to be), I laid eyes on what I think may have been a parakeet. If my memory is to be trusted, this really did happen.
Cursory Google research suggests that there was – at least by the 2020s – definitely a population of these naughty birdies spread across south Manchester. Said Google search revealed to me that numerous publications have planted flags on this topic before me, and that I am, in the final audit, a hollow sack. A little rat chasing obvious ideas like biscuits on a string. No more Googling, or I shall become depressed.
Parakeets live for some time. Another cursory Google search (pre-ban, don’t worry) told me that even the members of the little squadron I saw flying over the Thames might still be alive. They might have migrated north, to Stockport. A bit like me. And now we get to the point. I came to Stockport from Knutsford, which is supposed to be lovely but is actually a bit shit if you aren’t rich and don’t own a car. I have spent my life in various places that do not qualify me for inclusion in STAT, but right now I am firmly planted in Stockport. So there.
The naughty birdies are here too. I have seen them. My girlfriend and I have sighted them most consistently along the stretch of the Fred Perry Way that follows what in Scotland we’d call a “burn” from Great Moor down to Bramhall and Happy Valley, where the suburbs start to give way to wider green areas, and eventually farmers’ fields. We’ve also seen fleeting glimpses of them much closer to where we live, around Cale Green. We’ve seen them at Dunham Massey too, just west of Altrimcham. They were in the trees, as free as the deer and much less shy.
I do apologise if this is all sounding a bit too genteel for STAT. What brought me to Stockport, dear reader, was a desire to buy a house in an affordable price range – but in an area with something like the blend of comfort and liveliness I got to enjoy as a boy growing up in Broughty Ferry. Rather than boring you with objective material comparisons between the two locales I’ll try an esoteric metaphor. The parrot I saw in Broughty Ferry was not a wild animal – it had escaped its human owners recently, and was very much a lone desperado. My pre-ban research suggests that the wee buggers have since penetrated as far north as my hometown, but not in significant density. The parakeets of Stockport, by contrast, built their home here before I did. By exploring, I have wandered into their territories. By listening, I’ve learned to recognise their voices.
Desperate air-snatching for poetry done and out of the way, I’ll relate one final story, extracted from a little further back in my parakeet timeline. In the summer of 2019, I had just finished a vocational postgraduate degree that was exciting and nauseating in equal measure. Sensing that the iron trap of real adulthood was about to snap shut, I took myself on a long holiday, leaping from Dundee right into the very furthest reach of England: Cornwall. After many a wander and many a wistful sea-view pint, I took an overnight train from Penzance to London. I woke up at something like 4 a.m., stationary in Paddington. Terrified the train would depart before I could get up and off, I rose and fled to the platform. Then I realised I had left my bag. Terrified again, I sprinted back on, grabbed my bag, and sprinted off, right into the platform McDonald’s for my breakfast. From my McSeat I was able to see that for the next 45 minutes or so, and presumably beyond, the train remained firmly in place. More fool I.
Dazed and in need of coffee, but painfully aware neither my hotel nor any cafes would open for some time, I drifted my way into Hyde Park. Power professionals in running shorts breezed past me, again and again. I definitely saw other people too, but I trust my memory enough to calmly assert that many of the Hydey Parkers were very annoying members of The Elite. I, a more aimless creature, slotted myself onto a bench beneath a sterling English tree, jolly sterling, for a nice doze. The sunlight was cranked, so it was a strange sort of sleep, but pleasant nonetheless. Yet the nap shaded stranger still, queer indeed, when a naughty and perturbingly tropical sound disturbed it. My eyes flickered open. A flock of wee guys were landing in the branches overhead. Not far up really. With a jump and a swipe I could have grabbed one of the chaps. Held him like a hamster, and stared into his beady eye. Instead I sat there, amazed, amused, and, like them, indisputably far from the motherland.