Making a nest

A bronze wing pair have made a nest on the top of the mud brick wall just outside our bedroom. It's not a very elegant nest and from a distance it looks somewhat uncomfortable, but I daren't climb up to look to see if it's lined with softer things than spiky twigs, for fear of scaring the birds. But I have to say it looks precarious.

We have also started catching up with David Attenborough's latest wildlife series and in the first episode - on Antarctica - there was a section on an albatross and her chick.

The albatross had to leave the chick in the nest - in an Antarctic gale, while she searched for food. In the course of the storm the chick was blown out of the nest. For the nest was tall and did not seem to be deep - the chick was sort of perched on top. Not very sensible for the environment it lived in it seemed to us. Surely you would try to at least make it deep so that the chick could hunker down. I mean it was literally freezing cold too. It was also perched on a rock or something, and so the chick could not claw its way back up. And when the mother came back she didn't help, because apparently she cannot tell it's her chick, by sight or smell or sound. Fortunately, in this case the chick eventually levered itself back into the nest and all was well. Evolution gone badly wrong it seemed to me. So many mistakes - the design of the nest, where it was placed, and the non-recognition of one's young. And yet there, are penguins for example who will recognise the voice of its young in a huge colony of penguins.

Nests are precarious and ephemeral. The baby birds are not in them for very long, the first flight out of them can be extremely dangerous and once the babies have gone, the birds do not stay in them. Which is interesting because the symbolism of the nest is a paradoxical thing. It's a place of safety and comfort. Home I suppose. A place associated with childhood and being looked after. And yet when you try to find a quote about nests, mostly - no almost unanimously - the quotes are about the virtue of leaving the nest and seeking adventure. The nest as a negative, restrictive thing really. Almost a prison because the inhabitants - the babies - are unable to fend for themselves and are cut off from society and new things.

And yet, what I was going to muse on here was how much we all like to make ourselves a nest. Think of workplaces. People who sit at a desk at work most often have a few, sometimes many, personal items that they spread around to make them feel that it's their own little space. A photograph or two, a cuddly toy or a souvenir figure of a cat or an owl or an elephant - something that pleases anyway. Maybe there will be a special pen, or a special mug, a desk calendar, a special screen saver, a souvenir from a treasured holiday. I know these days an increasing number of offices have hot desks - whereby you just grab a desk that's free. Not a whole lot of opportunity for personalising there I guess, but I bet people still do to a limited extent anyway. I haven't looked into the research but it would be interesting to know whether it's a good thing psychologically or not. Drivers of all sorts of vehicles do the same things too.

I suppose the other aspect of marking a place as one's own is the territorial instinct. This is mine and nobody else is going to have it. And certainly some birds get very aggressive around nests - think diving magpies. People do too of course when protecting territory both on a small and very large scale.

But for me I think the aspect of the nest that appeals the most is the personalising of a space, of making it one's own. Though having now seen all of those other quotes I see that making your own nest cannot really be equated with the birds of this world. They make a nest for their babies, not for them. And both babies and parents leave it as soon as they can. Some take more care - enormous care - than others but even so they are ephemeral.

The only quote I found that equated to my own feelings was from Chloe Sevigny - yes a Hollywood actress, so not, probably, a great thinker, who said:

"My room was a real way of expressing myself. It was like a little nest that I could settle into."

One assumes she now has rather more than one room. I don't know the context of the quotation. Presumably it was in her youth. But it reminded me of the only time in my life that I had a room of my own - the last three years of university. The first year we had to share a room. My first ever room was tiny, and had no proper door - just a curtain I think, or maybe one of those plastic kind of folding sliding door. And the furniture, such as it was was built in, so not a lot of scope to move things around. But I had pictures - postcards, pictures cut from magazines, and I would pick rhododendrons from the grounds. In my last two years, my room - I had the same room for my last two years - was larger and you could move the furniture - a single bed, a small wardrobe, a desk and chair, a bookshelf and a more comfortable chair. So every term I would experiment and move them all around. My collection of cut out magazine pictures expanded and I made collages on the wall. I seem to remember there were lots of eyes. And it was all mine - for a while. I wonder how many other students have lived there over the years. Maybe not that many as the room was in an old army hut, one of many - leftovers from the war - and I believe they are no longer there.

Growing up I shared a bedroom with my sister and there was no spare space anyway. On leaving university I went back home - again to share with my sister, before I married. And I have been sharing our space together ever since. It's a shared nest, and I love it, but I do hanker for a tiny bit that I could call my own. For the chance to furnish and decorate without having to consult and compromise. At the moment the tiny bit of space that is truly my own is my desk (I'm too embarrassed to photograph the clutter there) and my kitchen.

Now I really love my kitchen and most of it is truly mine. I did design it myself. How everything is arranged on the shelves, in the cupboards and drawers, and on the bench top is all mine. But nevertheless it is not truly my own little nest. First because it is in the centre of the house, and is therefore inevitably a shared space - as it should be. The kitchen is the centre of the home - even the young, in that phase between the childhood home and the adult home tend to gather in and around the kitchen at parties and other gatherings. Secondly I share that bench with my husband and he tends to gradually expand - until I push him back a bit. Which is sort of nice. The kitchen is mine but it's not a nest - not like my husband's shed - which is entirely his. And moreover in spite of good intentions I did not decorate it with photographs from my travels in food, as I intended to do.

Sharing is wonderful but it always involves a certain amount of compromise. I would like a space that is just mine to do with what I want. That is mine. Which is not good really is it? It shows a certain amount of withdrawal and a certain amount of aggression simultaneously. So for now I shall just stick to my little space at my desk in our shared enormous study, and my shared kitchen space.

Not very food related I know, but it's so nice to have the bronze wings gently hooting away in the mornings that I had to write about them somehow. I wonder if there will be babies. It seems a little late in the year to me.