Squills, squeakers, grizzles and home sweet home

August 6, 2024, 11:17 am , by Richard Lutz

RICHARD LUTZ LOOKS HOMEWARD

Graham says you have to handle squeakers gently but firmly. He’s got one in his hand as he explains. We’re high on a quiet moorland in the Scottish hills.

A squeaker? It’s a baby racing pigeon and, somehow, the wee thing has been put in a wicker basket with Graham’s full grown racers.

How did the mix up happen? ‘Must have been me’ he says as he strokes the squeaker and then allows the adult birds out.

Twice a week, a squeaker or two notwithstanding, Graham drives 27 miles from his home on the Scottish west coast to free his flock of about two dozen. He takes them out of his car, lets them settle and then opens the basket. They hesitate, have a coo or two, slowly circle overhead as if to set their inner Satnav and then head straight as an arrow southwest towards Graham‘s house. Today, he holds the baby racer and I ask how fast the flock flies. Normal speed is about 36mph. A tailwind can increase speed to about 45mph. In pigeon lingo, that’s 1100 yards a minute. The faster speed, he tells me, is 1400 yards pm.

But how do they bloody know where to go? I ask this as the racers disappear towards the horizon. They’re reduced to tiny forms as they disappear, tattoos on a blue sky. Graham has a simple answer: ‘Instinct’ he says. And that’s the end of that line of questioning.

We drive back to Graham’s village. When we arrive the flock are all either in the loft or relaxing on an outdoor ledge, probably checking out their flight times, catching up on competition results from Belgium, moaning about the poor Wi-Fi signal in the coop. Graham checks the latest edition of Squills, the pigeon owners’ guide, (NB: the 2025 edition comes out in Oct) for an arcane pigeon fact or two and then gently cajoles the immature squeaker out from the basket. It flutters to the roof of the car. Graham shushes it away and the baby glides towards the coop. It’ll go to its mother.

Graham has no favourites in his pigeon loft that is overlooked by his big kitchen window. Though he admires a three year old grizzle- the name for a bird with a mix of white feathers and flecked colour. Later in the year Graham will head for a big annual Blackpool gathering. Maybe he’ll buy one or two birds. But nothing like the price paid recently for a racing champ. It went for…wait for this…£1.6 million.

Not bad for a racing pigeon who always knows where home is. As we all do. We turn towards home or maybe even turn our backs on it. But home is there, someplace to contend with, lean on, retreat into, maybe dislike. But it’s there.

And everyone must feel this. There have been hundreds of hundreds of songs, for instance, with the word Home embedded in their titles: Home on the Range, Homeward Bound, Take Me Home Country Roads, The Sweet Green Grass of Home, My Way Home and, poignantly, the Beatles’ She’s Leaving Home. A quick search found 21 songs simply with the solo word Home as a title. And as for movies: The Long Walk Home, Home Alone, Lassie Come Home, All The Way Home. Not to speak of the greatest story of a return to the hearth- The Odyssey.

This all becomes bit more relevant when I am told our old house of 38 years is on the market. We sold it only three years ago. Now, it’s on the block again. I do what any red blooded person would do: I go to the net. And there she is with the overblown sales pitch and waves of wide angle photographs.

It’s strange, unsettling, to see the place you tended, nestled in, stretched out in, slept in, furnished, raised a family in for close to four decades and it’s changed. Actually, it’s changed but still the same. What happened to the kitchen? Why alter the living room? How could they leave the garden so forlorn? And as for painting the dining room white and wipe out that soft violet colour that reflected an afternoon sun? Well…..

Of course, the normal reaction should be to turn your back on history. We sold it, bought another place and that’s your lot. But it’s the change to your old life, your old home, room by room, which reflected who and what you were and wanted to be. And the boys’ rooms which mirrored their growth.

Your home is not so much the heart of your life but also its veins and arteries. You are spread into the walls, under the floors, in the wood, ingrained into the paint and coiled within the wiring.

But now, today, the house is all Somewhere Else and reduced to a box of bricks spread across a property page. And to be fair, 41 years ago, we did the same when we moved in, changed things, moved things around, maybe made mistakes. But still. But still…