As shifty as drug dealers: a murder of crows on my chimney

A trip to the Burren give me a chance to commune with angels and ghosts - and takes my mind off the cackling intruders trying to build a nest on my roof

IT’S AMAZING how crows know when to start nesting. I saw two on the chimney last week, mooching about like shoplifters.

“You’ve got builders,” a man from Newtownbutler, Co Fermanagh said as we looked up at them. In the dining room the Newtownbutler man put his ear to the grate. “There’s a draught,” he said. “So you’re okay.”

I said: “I heard them cackling this morning.” He said: “If you heard them cackling there’s definitely no nest; if there was a nest the sound wouldn’t travel down the chimney.” “You’re a bright young man,” I admitted.

“All you need is a cowl,” he added. And, as is the way in good fairy tales, he happened to have one in his van.

And so off I went to Clare, my mind at rest, knowing that no crow would spend St Patrick’s Day engineering a dormer in my chimneypot. I met a girl from Wales in the hotel I was staying in.

“I like Irish music,” she said. “But I like our own music better. And sometimes I am lonesome here, especially when my mother phones and asks me when am I coming home.”

To avoid the lonesome spectacle of Irish people in green gombeen hats getting blind drunk, I took a walk in the Burren, though I couldn’t find Mullaghmore, where they never built the interpretive centre that the Medical Wallah is constantly talking about. “It would have ruined the Burren because it would have drawn too many visitors whose plodding boots on the rocks would have destroyed the delicate plants,” he argues.

I suggested to him once that the visitors’ boots might have moved the seeds around, and made the place flourish with even more wild flower, but he’s too zealous to be amused by that kind of blather.

Coming through Kilfenora, Co Clare I went into a graveyard, and squinted in the window of a derelict church. Dust had settled on the table, lectern and pews where devout people once worshipped. The name Davoren on a tombstone outside caught my eye, because many years ago my father lodged with a Davoren family in Clare. I don’t have any relations in Clare but my father took cuttings from a rose-bush in Davoren’s garden when he was leaving and the roses flourished in Cavan, and when I was getting married I took cuttings of the same bush to Leitrim, so I suppose I could say that my roses’ grandparents came from Clare.

When I returned to Leitrim I shared all my musings with the Medical Wallah, who came over to chill out at my stove. He said: “That stove has damaged your brain. Fire has eaten up the oxygen and left carbon monoxide in the air which you have absorbed and that’s why you’re face looks like a beetroot.” He’s not called the Medical Wallah for nothing.

Then I mentioned the crows on my chimney. “They’re as shifty as drug dealers,” I said, “and they’re still up there on the roof even though I got a cover on the chimneypot. Sometimes I think they’re spirits from another world, watching me.”

“Crows are not spirits from another world,” he said. “However, you are close to the truth.” Then he shook loose his grey pony tail, sat back in his chair, and expanded on his thesis.

“Crows, like all other sentient beings, are reincarnations,” he explained. “Reincarnation means we keep beginning life over and over again, until we become enlightened. But I’ve done the figures on overpopulation and it’s clear that there are more people alive now than in the entire history of the world. So there can’t be anyone left in the other world. And crows cannot be the reincarnation of humans because every human that ever existed is alive now. Humans, however, may be the reincarnation of crows. Do you see what I mean?”

I didn’t. I wanted to say that whatever damage the stove might be doing to my brain was nothing compared to the lesions marijuana was leaving in his poor cranium, but I desisted.

Sometimes as I watch strangers on the subway, or notice some beautiful human being though the window of a street cafe, I feel I am in the company of angels. And, alone in the wilderness, the wind changes and I often feel an angel at my shoulder. But I didn’t tell him all that. Nor did I mention my old friend John O’Donohue, who sleeps in Craggagh cemetery and whose lovely ghost gladdened my heart at the shoreline near Fanore the previous evening.