The Catbird Seat

In baseball, a batter with three balls and no strikes is said to be in the "catbird seat." It is a comfortable position, that seat. And that batter is the catbird who is in charge. It is the pitcher who is in the tight spot, sweating bug-juice.

I have also heard it said that the spot between the pitcher's mound and second base is called the catbird seat. This is where an umpire might stand in a game that can only afford one ump. It is a position of command, the spot from which the entire game can be observed and the plays to the left, the right, the front and all directions can be called with ease.

So, if there is a place to be, it is that catbird seat: a position for observation, witness and sweet comfort. For this reason, I call my new home the Catbird Seat.

Houses in England have names: Rose Cottage, Sunnyside, The Willows. A famous one from literature is Howards End. Back in Canada, there are also house names. You have probably heard of Green Gables.

Naming a house is a good idea. It makes it feel like a boat, a safe haven, a place of refuge and seclusion, a real bolthole. Bilbo Baggins had his Bag End. I have my Catbird Seat. It sits snugly on a hexagonal plot of land, a sort of an irregular pie-shape wedged, at the end of a cul-de-sac, next to a farm, on the northern edge of Bristol, in one of the four kingdoms that make up this land.

The Catbird Seat is an in-between kind of place: between city and country, between old and new, rich and poor, securely placed between the future and the past. From the Catbird Seat, I can see a council estate. It is a community of low rent housing towers that command a kingly view over the Severn Estuary and beyond. On the other side of the house, we have a farm pasture with rustic fences and footpath gates, a place where horses from a riding stable pleasantly graze. And up the hill a short hike is a manor estate with a grand house, a dairy garden, thatched cottages, folly castle and a lovers' leap, all now a part of a luxuriant city park for dog walkers and foot ramblers.

Around our house is an array, a glittering spiral of gifts reaching out to a wider world. There are village high streets, pocket graveyards, Roman mosaics, leisure centres, allotment gardens, Polish delis, chip shops and bus lay-bys. This is Penny Lane, but is is also the American Mall with box stores and food courts, palm trees reaching up to glass roofs, all with gushing fountain grandeur and carparks as far as you can see.

From the Catbird Seat, I can see many Britains: a land of coal burners in sitting rooms, as well as one with towering turbine windmills catching the breeze off the Irish Sea. There are rooftop solar panels, chimney-potted TV antennas, on-demand catch-up television and south-facing satellite dishes, one for each telly. There are hybrid cars with built-in navigation aids ready to "recalculate the route" with no-need-to-panic robotic voices and there are also chatty bus drivers ready to give you directions to Poundland or Iceland or the bingo hall at the top of the road.

From the Catbird Seat, I can quickly be in either of two kingdoms, this one called England and, across the Bristol Channel waters, another called Wales, where they sometimes speak another language. Both lands were once occupied by invaders from a distant land. Roman soldiers with fortified garrisons were here for 350 years, a time as long as the British Raj in India. All that has now passed, both empires dissolved in the morning mists. All that remains of Roman Britannia is a chipped mosaic tile or an old coin waiting ready to be uncovered by a garden spade or a hobbyist's metal detector.

From a distance, an ocean's separation, any land, any people may seem to be a homogenous unity. Up close the facets of the gem sparkle: many people living together, many ways of doing the same thing. In this one land, there is multitude. Nothing is predictable any more.

And so we come back to the bird. It's always about the bird, isn't it. A type of mockingbird, our Catbird is. Its call is like that of a meowing cat. And then it flies away, a flutter of dry feathers catching the air.

Nothing is what it at first seems. Even as we keep watching, it changes.