I have never actually gotten around to seeing any Alfred Hitchcock films – except for Psycho. Hitchcock having died around the time I started high school, his films really are for an older generation, and not as accessible.
Yes, I am a bit of a Philistine.
But I did read the short story on which he based the movie The Birds. It was in one of my optional additional English classes in 1984, and was written by Daphne Du Maurier, a fairly famous writer in her time (fun fact, her father George wrote the novel Trilby, which gave us the name for a type of hat and also the word ‘Svengali’).
It is around this time of year, when spring is about to break, that this short story and movie, which are all about birds relentlessly attacking people, comes to mind. In recent years, I have come to mark the start of spring not by the various trees in the Prunus genus sprouting into blossom (as I write I peer out into my garden and notice that the peach trees look like bursting into flower at any moment), but by all the magpies who suddenly turn hostile.
There’s a small park around the corner which is the size of two vacant house blocks. I regularly walk past it. It, and the adjoining large nature strip, are festooned by mature gum trees. These trees are the territory of several very aggressive magpies.
Since mid August, they have been making the fact that this is their territory known to all passersby through the simple device of constantly swooping on anyone who walks by.
And so I know that spring is here, although from the temperature outside today, you would not know it.
Lost For Words! 