📍Loci: The One for Sorrow Who Brought Me Joy

Each week I send out a short, fresh reflection from the road – photographs, sketches, and observations from old places that still have something to teach us. What follows is a moment from those travels.

WORDS

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy - The Darkling Thrush

OBSERVATIONS

The Magpie

It’s a grey winter’s day and I’m stood in one of the unholiest of places: the tram stop at Whitefield in Greater Manchester. The light is flat and monotone and the clouds are scrubbing the tops of the high-rise flats. There’s a bitter wind from the east. We all stand huddled, waiting. I observe those around me. Most find comfort in their devices. The blue cast of the screens lights their faces. The minutes are ticking down on the information board: four minutes until the tram arrives. I can feel my spirits sinking.

And then I see it out of the corner of my eye: an unexpected movement. A magpie hops onto the platform, shakes its head, and alights onto the track with a cackle. Looking one way and then the next, it ambles along the ballast and flits onto a sleeper. After two measured steps to one side it drops in-between the Bury bound sleepers.

I look up at the crowd around me - wan faces, caught in the time between - then I look back at the magpie. Its movements are more incremental now, focused on a small space around the ballast. The bird and I are in the starkest of places on the starkest of days.

'You’re not going to find anything there, my friend', I think to myself, until the bird comes to rest, arches its back, looks down, and picks up a large chunk of stone. It places the stone to one side and then pokes its beak into the recess and pulls out a grape as fresh as the day it was harvested.

The one for sorrow has brought me joy.

I look up at the information board - there’s just a minute left until the tram is here. I can see it in the distance: a jaundiced spec of yellow in the gloom. Just before the tram arrives, I take one last look at the people around me - they’re putting their devices away - intent on bagging the best spot on the tram.

I think to myself: “I shall hold the glow of the magpie and the grape for as long as I can remember, it’s a shame that nobody saw it’, until a woman across the platform catches my eye - she looks towards the ballast and then straight at me and mouths the word ‘Wow’.

How holy this unholy place has become.

Readers of the Genius Loci Digest

What stays with readers

That aura, those echoes - the muted light is transporting. What a space to feel rooted in history. I'd love to make that journey myself; you've stirred the opera lover and architectural dreamer in me.

@sonatasips via X