Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: With summer’s great silence coming, we must enjoy the birdsong while we can – as I have done with my local conifer croonerI have two summer earworms right now. The first is O Sole Mio, t...
See moreStoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: With summer’s great silence coming, we must enjoy the birdsong while we can – as I have done with my local conifer crooner
I have two summer earworms right now. The first is O Sole Mio, the jingle of our local ice-cream van, the second is a particular phrase that our resident blackbird keeps singing. Four notes, moving down the scale but ending slightly on the minor: that’s his party piece, delivered after a jazzy performance that includes dozens of other motifs. He likes to bellow it from the tallest tip of the conifer tree that sways over the road, and I can’t stop whistling it.
He will have developed this refrain over years, and like all musicians, he will have started off shakily. If I didn’t notice it last season, it was probably because he was still a shy apprentice, his song unfinished as he practised quietly to work out his preferred combination of notes.
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Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: With summer’s great silence coming, we must enjoy the birdsong while we can – as I have done with my local conifer croonerI have two summer earworms right now. The first is O Sole Mio, t...
See more