Approximately a million years before the pandemic I worked in the beautifully turquoise and evocatively named Zetland House near Old Street. While there I got into the habit of having lunch in Bunhill Fields. For anyone unfamiliar with the place, its full name is Bunhill Fields Burial Ground and it's a cemetery of some significance. There aren't many places where you can hang out with Daniel Defoe while you eat your sandwich. In fact there's only one, and it's this one.
It is also an oasis of calm next to what was the very busy Old Street roundabout, a place so choked with traffic that at one point even the giant Google beach ball grew impatient and tried to escape its intensity. In Bunhill Fields however, it's just you, the trees, and the dead. You can barely hear the traffic, and the dead keep their own council.
This isn't strictly true. There are the trees and the dead but there are also the animals. And it's the animals that I want to write about. I've had two strange encounters with them in this place. The first one involved crows. You of course know that the collective noun for crows is a murder, but on this occasion I witnessed a suggestion for the term's origin. There I was eating my sandwich (There was a great sandwich bar near Zetland House which gave me increasingly large fillings. I've no idea whether it's still there) when said murder of crows ascended from a branch. The branch was weak, probably rotten, and the collective thrust of (I will say it again) a murder of crows was enough to snap it off and send it crashing into the autumnal detritus below. I have no doubt that if anyone had been standing there the consequences would have involved an ambulance at best.
My second animal encounter happened not while I was writing, but while I was on the phone. I had some quite complicated personal business to attend to and so wasn't really paying attention to anything happening around me, so it was quite a surprise when I began to realise that I had wandered into the middle of a war.
This war wasn't reported on the news. John Simpson was nowhere to be seen and Kate Adie was otherwise engaged. It took me a while to appreciate what was happening, but while I was dealing with my boring human business, the squirrels were going into battle with the pigeons.
I first became aware of it when several pigeons swooped past me like feathery F1-11s. I thought it odd that they were flying so close, but then my eyes were drawn to the railings around the graves, where there were not one but two squirrels perched. They were actively watching the incoming pigeons, and as I took in the wider scene I could see that the pigeons were trying to scare off the squirrels, while the squirrels were very much standing their ground. Moreso, they were aggressively chasing away any pigeon that dared to land.
What had started this feud? Was there some super-stash of food within the graveyard that both sides coveted? Was it Daniel Defoe? Whatever it was, it was fiercely contested. As I began to appreciate the magnitude of what I'd walked into, a squirrel approached me. It advanced a little more and I froze. We looked each other in the eye and it advanced some more. Where the hell was I? Geographically I was still in Bunhill Fields but psychologically I was somewhere quite alien. I was being stared down by a squirrel and the squirrel was winning. This wasn't my fight and I didn't even understand the war I found myself in. And so I left, uncertain of my place in the order of nature. From then on I avoided that side of the cemetery, even though the other side included murderous crows.
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