When the male black-footed albatross is courting, he indulges in a dance that is unique to him, and which includes head-bobbing, bill-clapping, head shaking, calling, wing lifting and sky pointing.
All over nature, creatures have their courtship rituals, me included.
But from now on, I will do it with displays of parallel parking.
With spring just around the corner, I knew that I was being challenged to re-assert my position as sole breeding male when I heard Caroline describe her relationship with me to a man in the same queue as us at the local deli as: Him? I’m sort of with him’.
Like an albatross, like a shearwater for that matter, I reckon to have paired for life. And, like an albatross might hope at the same stage of his marriage in the same circumstances, I had rather felt that I had broken free of ‘sort of’ and should be at least in the resigned ‘Yup. Him’ territory. After 27 years of marriage, it is a humble ambition.
Decades ago, I might have stripped to the waist when I got home, like that Cornish bloke with the scythe on TV, and done something violently physical in the garden. Or sauntered off to trap and skin a rabbit, or felled a tree. This would equate to the albatross fighting off competitors.
As my strength recedes with age, and stripping to the waist simply stops being an option, I have dialed down the physicality, and done things like cooked the best meal I can, or written a poem, or swept the kitchen floor before being asked to. At an extreme, I might go out into the drive and wash her Mini. It’s the equivalent of the wandering albatross coming back to the nest tussock with a load of fresh grass in its beak.
But this morning’s ‘I’m sort of with him’ incident appeared to call for sterner measures, and sterner measures is what it got.
One of the weaker contributions that I make to our marriage is in the quality of my parallel parking. Frankly, I am so bad at it that my passengers either end up apologizing to the pedestrians for my car sharing the pavement with them, or calling up an Uber to take them over the vast distance remaining between my parked car and the side of the road.
‘You really are crap at this, aren’t you?’ they say, before hurrying off to pretend they have never clapped eyes on me before.
But as Joe Biden recently found out, just because you fail hopelessly at something for 30 years, doesn’t mean that you won’t eventually succeed. ‘Give enough monkeys enough typewriters,’ as they say, ‘and you will find another Shakespeare sooner or later’. Thus, in the spirit of Joe Biden, I found an excuse to parallel park our car in another part of town in the comically small distance between a new Range Rover with an ‘I love burning Fossil Fuels’ sticker, and a little Prius that looked a tiny bit too smug for my liking. Throwing my mind back those 44 years to when my father made me practice parking on the Terminus Road Industrial Estate in Chichester, I found myself remembering exactly what he had said I should do, and then, to my astonishment, actually doing it. On the very first attempt, without any swearing, I found myself three inches from the kerb, and half a metre away from each of the cars. Reader, it was both moving and beautiful.
‘Voila!’ I said rather pointlessly, gilding what was already a beautiful lily. It was the point at which David Attenborough would have said something about persistence paying off, and the circle of life continuing.
I’m not quite sure what I was then expecting- possibly a Pulitzer Prize- but she then did the equivalent of the female albatross just heading off without a word for a three month fishing trip. Except hers was to the Co-op, and only for a couple of minutes.
By the time she got back, the air had seeped out of the metaphorical balloon, but I knew in my heart that she was mine again, and that there would be no more of that ‘I’m sort of with him’ nonsense.
Speechless. That’s what she was.
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