30.4

Daylightingale 

TS Eliot had a nightingale singing in the Convent of the Sacred Heart.  
Eric Maschwitz had one sing in Berkeley Square for Vera Lynn to warble about.  
My nightingale sang on the High Road near Fobbing: a solo performance for me alone, 
in the early afternoon of a sunny Summer Day in 2005
during which I had spent a couple of hot hours 
trudging footpaths and Rights of Way as part of my civic duty.  

I had a little lunch with me and needed somewhere to tuck in. Better to be off the road, out of the way and an unused field gate was there for me. I backed up into the tall grass and got the rear end against the gate.  But not touching lest I scratch my wife's near-new MPV.  Windows down then, all of them.  Friendly shrubbery provided shade from the sun and a bird sang. Like a Robin, no, a Thrush, maybe a Blackbird?  None of these!  My ear is too well tuned from a lifetime's listening.  This song was like all three but much more.  And it was only metres away, a strange brown bird, bigger than a robin but very lookalike, smaller than a blackbird, sweeter than a thrush, a warm uniform brown like the colour of a hazelnut.  I had never seen a bird like that before but instinctively, I knew what it was and when I checked it out later at home I knew why I had never seen it before.  They don't come to Ireland.  Indeed they are very selective about where they come in England.  They come to Thurrock, to Fobbing, to the High Road.  Fifty feet further East and the nightingale would have been in Essex.