URSABLOG: When Doves Cry

When the temperature gets a little warmer, and spring looks as though it will finally arrive, the battle begins once again, and this year – in the spirit of the times perhaps – it seems to being brought to me especially vehemently.

I live in the centre of Athens, where trees and greenery are scarce, but I am fortunate to have a fourth-floor apartment overlooking a church, with some trees in the courtyard surrounding it. Although this means I will never escape from the ringing of the church bells and therefore never be able to have that long Sunday morning lie-in, at least I am not living face-to-face with the residents of another block of apartments opposite. The view looks out over the concrete rooftops of southern Athens, and in the distance I can see the gigantic cranes of the container terminal in Perama. The balcony is large and spacious, and I continue to work out which plants do well, and which don’t, especially the herbs that are essential for my cooking; not all survive the heat of an Athenian summer. It is a quiet street, and even though it is in the centre of Athens the noise of the traffic rarely penetrates except as a distant hum. It is a wonderful place to start the day with a cup of coffee, or in the evening to sit with a glass of wine and a book, or with friends, and watch the sun set, the stars come out and the moon track blithely across the sky.

Unfortunately I am not the only one who thinks so. Two Eurasian collared doves, δεκαωκτούρα in Greek, share my opinion and whilst they have always been trying to move in on my balcony, this year they seem even more determined. But it is a strange fight, and one that puzzles me. It would make sense for them to wait for me to leave for work, and take advantage of my absence to build a nest and settle down. But it seems to me that they are only aggressive when I am there: either early in the morning if I am sitting outside with a coffee, but especially at the weekends when I am more obviously in residence. Only then do they start to bring twigs to make fairly pathetic attempts at home building.

And so the dance begins. I disturb them by banging on the railings, they fly across to the pine tree opposite and wait until I go back inside so that they can try again. Then I hear them again with their distinctive cry – they are call δεκωτούρα, literally ‘eighteens’ because their cry sounds like that word in Greek – and I come out again to scare them away. They get bolder and bolder, maybe because it seems to them that a middle-aged man with a slipper in his hand is not the existentialist threat that they originally thought.

They are probably right: I do not object particularly to these urban doves; they are not the pigeons (περιστέρια) which I am used to from London, dirty and aggressive. They have a beauty and cheeky charm of their own, and their call – at a distance – can be quite soothing. But at a distance. Whatever my apparent soft-hearted nature and kindness, it does not extend to excessive bird-droppings and other mess on my clean balcony, and once I let one couple of doves move in, this will only encourage every other mating pair in the neighbourhood to move in too.

It is not as if there aren’t other alternatives: the flats both above and below me are unoccupied and there is the roof of my and many other apartment blocks around me that accommodate them. But it’s my balcony – with the shade, the greenery and the protection from the elements and perhaps their instinctive fear of airborne predators (although Athens is not known for its’ eagles) – that they want.

Perhaps this year is different because it no longer carries the deterrent of my cat Chrysa, who lazily patrolled the boundaries of my balcony in previous years. I sadly lost her to lymphoma last year, and whilst I still do not have the heart to replace her – she was too special, too idiosyncratic, too beautiful and companionable for me to even consider an alternative, even now – I will have to carry on her work, such as it was, in her memory.

So I have started to install anti-pigeon spikes on the air conditioning unit and elsewhere. I am not completely heartless: I keep one of the plant pots full of water so that they can drink when they like (a little too soft-hearted perhaps). But I still cannot shake the feeling that they make the most noise and fuss in their attempts to make a new home only when I am there. It’s as if they are knowingly picking a fight, even though it’s one they will ultimately lose. I will surely – I hope at least – outlive them.

I remember my grandmother telling me in France that the best way to stop swallows from settling was to wait until they had built the nest and then dislodge it with a stick, eggs and all. Even then, I was alarmed by this approach – I am very fond of swallows – but now it seems to make more sense. She was brought up in harder, more brutal times than me. Deterrents have the option of being ignored if the aggressors are dead set on succeeding. Sometimes definitive action is required.

This instinct – both the doves’ desire to make a new home, and mine to protect my own – seems to be hard-wired, whatever the species. At dinner with a friend this week, she expressed her dismay at the tension and stress that working in a large shipping company gave her. The work itself, whilst not particularly technically hard or difficult – let’s say it doesn’t particularly stretch her intellectually – is nonetheless important, urgent and relentless. But it was the politics of her workplace – the desire for control and influence over people, the drama over ultimately irrelevant  things, carving out of small social kingdoms in competition with each other, and the toxicity that resulted from it – that drained and dismayed her. She resented the lack of ambition and professionalism of those around her: rather than using their energies to make themselves and the company better, they seemed not only content, but determined to pursue meaningless battles with each other, by fair means or foul, in fact by mostly – as it sounded to me – sneaky strategies that brought no final resolution, or improvement, to anyone, except perhaps to their own limited sense of who they think they are.

Being determined and ambitious herself, the lack of determination and ambition of others to improve their lives and their companies frustrated her. Some were just happy to stay where they were, keep what they had and deal with what was around them when it happened, and assigning it top priority. Others, but evidently not so many, were continually trying to grow and move forward as if there was someone unknown and invisible whispering in their ear: “this is not enough.” This often meant moving on to other companies after a while.

But maybe this voice is whispering to all of us, and we just react in different ways. Some are determined to grow, some are determined to maintain and protect what they already have. Others – tired of the fight, or bewildered and wounded by the stresses and challenges it brings – decide to give up and drift, and spend their lives avoiding and trying to ignore that little, insistent, voice hoping it will give in, or simply go away and try someone else.

This little voice is not limited to individuals alone, but manifests itself in companies, communities and societies as well. And some people are adept at channeling the ambitions and desires of those around them to lead them to better things, as individuals and communities of people living and working together. Others, equally adept at reading the mood, manipulate grievances and negative energies for their own benefit at the ultimate expense of those they are supposed to lead. And then there are those, bewildered and threatened by the world around them, who can only react to this environment on a case-by-case basis without building anything better, not even making enough time and energy to think consider it. But we are a complicated species: there are elements of all the above in everyone.

And, after all, we are also a social species, and from the earliest age we have to interact with the people and environment around us. We cannot choose to whom we are born, or how and where we are brought up. And at any time of our lives, we have to start from where we are, and not make excuses for why we weren’t born in a different time or place, or worse hark back to a time and place that never existed, however tempting or comforting these siren songs may be.

When I read the plethora of conflicting and confusing executive orders coming out of the current US administration I have found myself shifting away from thinking “this is wrong,” or “this is stupid” as though my moral superiority (dubious at the best of times) will see me and the world through. I now find myself thinking “what will this mean?” or “how can we make the best of this?” The world is changing, and quickly. Objecting to it is not enough just as blindly accepting it, or agreeing with it, is dangerous.

Likewise, having read the impressive but wordy and repetitive Government Work Report at the Third Session of the 14th National People’s Congress, delivered by Premier Li Qiang on behalf of the State Council, I am left wondering not how delightfully archaic and characteristic of the Xi Jinping the language is, and whether most ordinary Chinese actually read this stuff, but how these powerful and determined tasks they have set themselves will affect the world, Asia, shipping and therefore me, my company, and where and with whom I live and work.

Even reading the news as Europe, including the UK as it now necessarily must, deals with threats of various natures from East and West (and elsewhere), I must fight the feeling that even though the responses seem to be reactive and hopeful rather than proactive and powerful, there is nothing much we can do anyway. This is where I live – balcony, pigeons and all – and I will have to deal with it toο.

And shipping of course is not only, not even, the US, China and the EU; it is the means which binds the whole world together, and whilst success in it depends in part on the interaction of the world with each other, there is a still a necessity to change with the times and adapt to it. This can only, ultimately, be done by people.

I wonder whether I am – so to speak – just a middle-aged man on his balcony, trying to maintain the status quo of his life, and keeping the δεκαωτούρα off, and hoping the rest of the world will just carry on as it is. Or whether I had just not realised I had this problem whilst I still had Chrysa with me. But now I feel her loss again, in a different way, and wonder if I had done all I could to keep her with us. Did I pay enough attention at the time to what she brought to me? And if I had, would I also have noticed her illness sooner?

For now, at least, the doves seem to have got the message, and have settled down for the afternoon elsewhere. But the world keeps turning, and they will no doubt arrive again tomorrow morning, driven on by the desire to make their lives better. They will be met by me, drinking my morning coffee, in much the same mood. Let’s see how things turn out.

Simon Ward