Music from an early city

February 9, 2025, 8:05 am , by Richard Lutz

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly”

Richard Lutz pricks up his ears on a morning stroll

Well, for The Beatles those intriguing lyrics fit well. But this morning the blackbird’s song is music.

Along with bursts from thrushes and robins, there’s the workmanlike rat-a-tat of a busy woodpecker. They’re all part of the waking sounds of a city, where the day begins.

I live near a big road heading west out of Glasgow (therefore, its name: The Great Western Road). So inevitably there’s a constant undercurrent of inbound traffic. Similar to the sounds of a sea meeting the shore. Angry horns intermittently pockmark the rush. An ambulance hurries past, its siren parting the roads and slowly decreasing in intensity as it disappears towards a hospital.

Then there’s an urgent burst from a pneumatic drill starting a repair. It joins in with the woodpecker chipping away at a tree.

I pass a gaggle of kids going to school. Each is on a phone, gabbling away. A mother patiently explains clouds to her child. There’s the padpadpad of an earnest runner tricked out in an expensive pair of orange Brooks. And if you’re near the city gorge, you’ll spot (but never hear) a kingfisher zipping above The Kelvin….

…which is a river that rolls through the city. It thrums with the rushing and tumbling sound of power. Especially when it encounters a bridge, rocks or small cataract.

Breaking the traffic noise and the road drills is a soft roar of planes lifting off from the city’s airport. And, of course, more birds as the city wakes. There’re wrens, tits, magpies, and with their caw-caws calls- the crows. They roam, lurk, and settle in trees. They have a malevolence about them- even their scientific name has a menacing feel. They’re corvids. And corvids they’ll always be… predatory with a beady eye for the next meal.

These layers are the morning choir. The beginning of busyness. In many countries, it can be religious too. There are monks walking the street with their bells and begging bowls and the litany of prayers in Burma and Thailand. There is the call to the mosques in Egypt and in Pakistan. There’re the Catholic church bells of Italy and Spain.

And everywhere, no matter where, there’s the morning rattle of coffee and tea cups as cafes and breakfast joints open their doors to early risers, commuters, the school kids, the mother patiently explaining the tapestry of clouds to a child wrapped up against the morning cold.