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very grown-up.
    Mum has started a part-time job with a local estate agent. Just on Saturdays. She reckons that she will be the first to get to know if anything exciting turns up in the way of a suitable house for us to buy, and she’s always been nosy about people’s houses, so this is the ideal job for her. And I can phone her at work if I need her in a hurry.
    She lives in the past, but I suppose all adults are like that.
    She has this awful habit of speaking in capital letters, like everything she says is vitally important. I usually ignore her. I do talk to the cats. Only Charlie talks back to me. The others are silent. Good listeners though. I have just remembered something about the real Pop – he called Grandma ‘Mate’, and until I was quite grown up I thought that was her name. In their house the floor was always called ‘the deck’ and I learned my port and starboard before I knew left from right.
    Today the sea seems bigger than usual. The waves are sort of wintry and… broiling, I think the word is. I don’t think I like the sea very much. It’s just too… big!

CHAPTER FIVE
    Note: There are so many different sorts of gulls and I can’t tell the difference between them really, except I know what a herring gull looks like, because of Pop. He’s a mature male – larger than the female – you have to see them together to tell that the male is heavier and bigger than his mate. The young ones are brown and speckled. In St Ives they are all over the roofs, making a great racket, all squawking and wheezing and hunching their shoulders like they’ve got asthma, and the very young ones jump up and down flapping their virginal… or is it vestial… wings? They hang about for weeks being waited on by their parents who regurgitate fish and chips and pasties for them to eat. I wonder if they suffer like humans by eating rubbish? All those E numbers.
    Pop hasn’t brought a female to our house to nest. He must be a bachelor or a widower, or maybe he’s gay. I wonder if they have homosexual gulls?
    Last year’s young are all flying together and learning stuff from the mature ones. They gather at sunset on our beach and listen to one or two mature gulls and go off together and rise on the thermals. I think they’re learning how to fly and gather food and chase hawks. I’ve seen them go really high.
    I ’ M MUCH BETTER today so I’ve got a backpack – very lightweight – with a bottle of water, an orange, a banana, a Mars Bar (yum), and a pocket book of bird identification. And of course, I’ve got Mr Writer’s binoculars around my neck. And I’m going for a nature walk. Mum is sunbathing in the garden. And I’ve got my new notebook and pen.
    I’ve already seen a stonechat, I think it was – it makes a noise like a stone scraping on another stone or a chalk on blackboard. Sort of crich, crich!
    Last night I read right through Jonathan Livingston Seagull in one go. It’s very short. I think it’s about religion really, or maybe just about trying to achieve something special in your life – a sort of philosophy. It’s about this gull who doesn’t want to be part of the flock, he wants to be the best, fastest flier of all time, and he goes off on his own to do just that, and I think he dies and goes to heaven but I’m not really sure, and then he teaches other extraordinary gulls to do what he has done. Anyway, since I read it I’ve been watching the gulls more carefully, and it’s true, there are gulls who only seem to be with many others in a flock, doing whatever everyone else is doing, whether it’s scavenging in the harbour or flying out to sea to sit on a load of fish, and then there are the unusual gulls who seem to fly on their own, the individualists. Maybe they are more like people than we think.
    It’s a very beautiful coast path, this, with pink heather blooming and bright yellowy gold gorse, which smells lovely – like Ambre Solaire or something. There’s only the sound of the