Death in the afternoon

Yesterday was one of those Argyll days which call out ...walk..walk...walk. So we did - along Loch Striven side. This is a single-track road with occasional passing places, and it doesn't go anywhere. So it's usually quiet, except for the odd driver taking granny for a hurl to look at the view. The view itself is worth a look, having all the elements - water purling down the hillside after the recent heavy rain, a heron flying up the loch, the bracken a wonderful rich brown, rose hips red against the dark of a hill, the low sun slanting through the branches.

Slanting through the branches and illuminating the frenzied scurrying of hundreds of pheasants. As we walked, new crashings in the undergrowth would warn us that yet another family of birds was about to charge out in front of us, or whirr past on creaking wooden wings - for that's what they sound like: wooden toys. Flying seems to be such hard work for them that it's easy to look, to admire the colours, the tail feathers. And, presumably, to take aim and fire. For these pheasants are bred here in huge numbers, fed from blue plastic containers on short legs among the trees, free to rummage in the hedgerows and die in a splatter of feathers when they play chicken on the road. This we know.

But I still wasn't prepared for how I felt yesterday as a procession of black Range Rovers drove us into the ditch. I stood and glared at the grinning, loden-green occupants, and knew why they were there. This was confirmed by the last but one vehicle, an open-backed truck with a frame holding gently waving rows of dead birds. Behind them was what looked like a wartime military lorry in which sat two rows of young boys and girls: beaters, presumably. They looked like conscripts, or maybe refugees.

And I felt that the afternoon had lost some of its light.

Pheasantries

At the end of a perfect spring day, with nary a cloud in the sky, I am left pondering the risky life of the pheasant. We were walking along Loch Striven this afternoon, where pheasants are raised for sport and fed from sinister-looking drums on legs tucked invitingly among the silver birch trees by the loch. Pheasants invite a mixture of hilarity and pity as they scuttle along in the manner of a speed walker determined to keep one foot in contact with the ground at all times. You feel like yelling at them: "You're a bird. Fly, dammit!" - and then they do, whirring out of the undergrowth with heart-attack inducing suddenness.

I thought of these birds, thinking food comes from blue drums, living among their friends in the sunshine, loving and begetting and doing what they do (sorry - I'm misquoting a poem here) - only to be shot and eaten come the season. And I felt sorry for them - briefly. Because I eat meat. And these birds, as Mr B sapiently observed, have much more fun playing chicken with the cars than any chicken in a battery - or even free ranging.

But enough of this bucolic rambling. Tomorrow we head off to Oban to hear Bishop Martin sing the part of Christus in the St John Passion, in his own cathedral. Neat, that.