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One of the natural wonders of Brighton

Brighton's natural wonders

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Wednesday, 17 March 2010

Oh they’re back! In their tightly orchestrated swarms, spinning around and alighting all at once, swooping up and blocking out the light, chattering and twittering as they flutter by me. They are one of the natural wonders of Brighton and their reappearance always signals the start of spring to me.

I wonder at their bright markings and subtle differences in colour. I am amazed at how great their numbers are every year, and how they all manage to move in such a chaotically coordinated way before finding a perch and chattering.

I was watching a flock of them yesterday as they folded and wafted around the pier, a second flock swept down from Ship Street, blending with the main flock and the noise of twittering, tweeting and chattering extended exponentially. They look and move like a very animated cloud and quite how they manage to expand, contract, twist, turn and then recombine in such a marvellous demonstration of Brownian motion mixed with the herd instinct is beyond my comprehension. They are a joy to watch but hell to try and walk through.

Why, oh why, does this huge critical mass of language students all coalesce at vital junctions in the City, to chatter and gossip and spread out like a wide sticky tar full of slow moving eddies, to catch all and sundry in their congealing social net and blocking my thoroughfares.

I was trapped in the South Lanes yesterday by three flocks of them. I became quite anxious and grabbed at my bonnet in an agitated way before realising I only imagined I was wearing one. To the north a group of neon clad French students, all dark mutters and shoplifting eyebrows (like Klepto Kahlo’s) spread from wall to wall, to the south the lean, tall and unmistakably louche Italian language students advanced on me, shouting and waving their mobile phones around, taking pictures of each others ruck sacks. They looked like a horde of menacing Papal Hunchbacks. To the East with their eyelashes and tight jeans were the Spanish students, a quagmire of linked arms, curly hair and curious stares, I almost swooned and knowing myself cornered, backed into the Cupcake shop, almost gagging on the cloying stench of freshly baked low-self-esteem-muffins and watched as the human polyglot tide pressed its face against the glass, one girl actually licked the glass - before moving on.

Having walked the streets (in many ways) of the great European capitals I can testify to there not being large gaggles of British language students aimlessly milling around and blocking their charming streets, but then perhaps this is because British students are lazy and would no more study the tongues of their neighbours than they would take their feet off the seats and turn their fucking iPods down. (Breath Eric, breath, slowly in, and out).

Or thinking about it more rationally perhaps this is subtle Euro revenge on us for exporting our dreadful football louts across the continent for the last decades, besmirching them with urine, violence, tattoos and potbellied northern men dressed in nylon. God knows, after this year's World Cup, what the South Africans are going to send us in revenge. It’ll be herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically along the Western Road or a troupe of Baboons filling, raiding and trashing Bond Street. At least they'll blend in with the murmuration of the starling flocks that swoop in the skies over the pier and we can relax in appreciating their natural wonder and know that we have got exactly what we deserve.