I’ve been mulling. It started incoherently at first. Thoughts flitting like birds hither and yon. Birds were on my mind, perhaps, no doubt because of meeting Marina who struck me as bird-like from the off. A small finch, edging its way into the garden to get at the ball of suet, or nuts in a cage, fearful of the world around it. When we say bird-like it is always those little, timid ones we have in mind, it seems; not some great condor, or bald-pated vulture smeared in blood and offal, or the frankly obscene s**t-eating Marabou stork, that stuff of nightmares. And even those little, timid ones are all wrong, with their puffed out breasts making them top-heavy and rather ludicrous as they hop about the place. She was nothing like any of these things.
Best just to say that Marina was a smal
