Dead Bird Season Revisited

Yesterday I got out of dodge. I was starting to feel stagnant seeing the same scenery. So I took a visit to the town where there be a lot of chefs and I had a very pleasant stroll in a forest. It was a rather convoluted journey. If I was driving it would have taken me an hour to get there but I was relying on Norn Iron's transport system which operates a system that dates back to sometime in the 1940's. But why would this bother me? Being on public transport means your going somewhere! I took the train to Belfast and the bus for the rest of the journey. While on the bus I thought back to my travels in Ecuador. There was something about the lush, green, sloping fields that reminded me of home. And the traditional Ecuadorian Women who reminded me of Pearlie.

I hated public transport when I was younger. I hated making journeys on my own and I have been caught out a couple of times and stranded in places I didn't want to be. The doors once didn't open at the Cullybackey stop (I swear it must've been a technical fault but over the years I have come to doubt this and wonder did I maybe not press the button to open the doors - who knows?) and I had to get off at the next stop which was miles away. I also jumped on the wrong train after getting home from Amsterdam so late at night that I'd missed the last train to Stoke and had to sleep on a bench. I was listening to music and didn't hear where the train was going and it took me a while to realise that I was going in completely the opposite direction of Stoke. I am sure there was also some kind of incident when I was about 13 involving me getting on the wrong train back from Dublin but the details are a little hazy.

I have become very accustomed to public transport now and I enjoy the random meetings of individuals who each have a little story to tell. I once took a coach in Thailand from Bangkok to Krabi. I wanted to travel in comfort but I got a bit confused between first class and buisness class and I went for buisness. The majority of passengers on the bus were Thai buisness men. It was a memorable journey though and at 2 O'Clock in the morning the coach stopped at a massive night time food market. All the men jumped out and had great big feeds that would have choked a donkey. I just smoked.

I took my camera with me yesterday but I was in good company so I didn't take a lot of snaps even though the whole place was very photogenic. Although, on the way back we noticed a dead magpie at the bottom of a tree. This was just at the start of the walk and we hadn't noticed it before. Forever the detective I touched the bird to see if it was long dead. It was kind of cold but rigor mortis had not set in. This made me think of dead bird season when I kept seeing dead birds. I just checked out the significance behind it today. A dead bird is often seen as an ominous sign. Since a bird represents freedom a dead one can signify the loss of freedom. But for every negative spin on a happening there are the positive spins and one site claims it to be a sign of the end of a something negative and the beginning of a positive phase in your life. The other spin on it is that death is the biggest part of life and creatures die all the time and it really means nothing other that what that dude Elton John sang about. It was probably just as well it was dead for had it been injured I would have been compelled to take it home and nurse it back to health. And, of course, I don't really rate Elton John and it doesn't seem logical to me that a dead bird should equate a loss of freedom or anything negative and that leaves the only other spin, which is a dead bird is a symbol of good times to come :)