Feed the Birds

It was a drizzly day, gloomy and wet, but surprisingly not that cold. My route to the law faculty takes me past a little church, and its churchyard always attracts a number of pigeons.

Today, because of the rain, they were all puffed up, heads tucked into oversized fluffy necks, and wings swollen with ruffled feathers. Why, I wondered, did all the pigeons puff up in the same way?

For warmth, was my first thought, by trapping extra air. But I've been through colder days, without noticing any pigeon-swelling, let alone en masse inflation, so that couldn't have been it.

Perhaps it had something to do with the rain, rather as how we use umbrellas.

Maybe, I thought dubiously, but maybe it was for no particular reason at all - a genetic hiccup that made them expand when it rained, just as humans have opposable thumbs for no apparent reason or purpose, other than a quirk of nature.

As I walked down Turl Street, past Exeter college and a homeless person selling some magazines, and under some scaffolding in a mist of rain, I wondered whether we were deceiving ourselves in thinking that any part of our Life, or the reality we have hewn from the bedrock of a state of nature, was really for any purpose whatsoever.