Swan Shenanigans (Swananigans)

The canal and I have got history. When I first moved to the city, so distracted was I by it actually being such a thing, that I dwelled little upon the reality that, for me, Leicester was little more than a surrogate London. Whereas the Thames predates its milieu, the waterway that cuts through the motor city infrastructure of Leicester was crafted not by your Gods, but by man. If the city – a forest of concrete erections that, if you excuse the self-indulgent punnery, inspire Freudian envy in men of a certain age – is humankind’s greatest achievement, then the canal is surely a fractional one, an accomplishment within an accomplishment; a containment of perhaps the most immovable of the classical elements within a manmade paradigm. These counterfeit rivers do for that profulence of H2O what reservoirs do for lakes, and what McDonalds meals do for the good, natural name of beef.

The last irresistible crack aside, I place little weight in bucolia. Don’t misread that; I’m certainly an environmentalist, but urbania can be as beautiful a landscape as a blank-slate field, and what particularly interests me is the ramifications of environment on the human psyche. What applies to nature too applies to humanity; contraception, abortion, euthanasia, and then incarceration, militarism, murder are manners of regulating our sentience just as we do the water. The course your life, and mine, takes will be determined ultimately by where we stand in the hierarchy of capitalism, although to use the word “regulation” bears a bitter irony in this context. These thoughts become increasingly fractured; I try to grasp the fragile strings of ideas I devised forty years ago, to articulate them as I would have then, to compliment them with subsequent cognizance, subsequent wisdom; yet they slip from my grips, lubricated by distraction and eroded by time. Of course, it was wondering this grey-stone shore that I first devised the theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement, but I must regain my personal equilibrium before I brief the uninitiated, for I am in the throes of a great malaise, and it is the fault of the swans.

I have always had a complicated relationship with the swans of the Leicester. Is it not unthinkable to be incapable of abstract thought? To me, it would once have been, but I have since fulfilled the role of a guest speaker at my nephew’s secondary school, and I can attest; it’s extremely thinkable. But, to my knowledge, swans have never had education budgets slashed by the apparently employability-centric scimitar of Michael Gove – their innate capabilities are only for the most basic of instincts; to reproduce, to feed, and survive. So, in this unthinking utopia, do they only know happiness? Or is that extreme contrasted by another – an inherent proclivity to shit the proverbial pants? Do swans know only happiness…and fear?  Primal instinct has a delirious joy; we would all like to fuck like a swan – not fuck a swan – but the reckless abandon they are presumably imbued with as they frolic in the canal is antithetically answered by, when danger rears its ugly head, by a justified fear of death.

To a human, what is more terrifying than death, other than life? How could a swan even know of death? I imagine they are more familiar with a loose sense of imminent danger, but who’s to say their conception of mortality isn’t more concrete? Does the swan know what’s unknowable? Is it possible to know the unknowable only when faced with the great unknown, the seeming unknowable perversely the last thing you’ll ever know? Those four decades ago, suffering from a rampant cold, I needed to blow my nose.

I have passed the swans, and now I can tell you about the Theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement. It is what I have been building to; in an ascension of words that mirrors the way my own trajectory has sloped downward in the years since the heyday of the theory. Images of subjacent collisions colour my brain; dashed on concrete or dropping to a waterbed with a voluminous gloop. I have always found this tract of the canal to be extremely vertiginous, on account of a the first night I ever went drinking with the group who would prove my closest friends for the next few years, and one of these friends stumbled precariously along the very edge of the Grand Union Canal. Assuming he was, like a swan, aware of his imminent plight, I neglected to question him on the issue. Of course, he fell into the canal. Hesitantly, three of us dragged him out, and after a week of debating as to whether he had succumbed to a ravaging case of pneumonia, he reemerged. It took him, however, a year to replace the pair of glasses that he had, you could say, bequeathed to the swans.

5% of pneumonia victims die. A similar figure, perhaps, for other bacteria that might be in the water system. The Theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement may sound like a mouthful to you, but I am a writer, and not a mathematician or a scientist or a sociologist – and I am certainly qualified at none of these things – and I am getting to be an old man, and the percentages are harder for me than they once were, when I was a young man, when I had just left school, and the basic mathematical principles were relatively fresh in my mind, not rusted, not buried, not submerged among the detritus of forty further years of severely impractical thinking. Prognostic was my get-out clause, my admission that by its very nature the theory was predicated on guesswork, prognostication; soothsaying for the modern day. And, of course, contemporary soothsaying is best conveyed by percentages. That is what it was; a percentile division of the things that might – just might – kill you.

“Yes, I’m a charlatan! But in the 1970s, ours was a permissive society.” I said to the man on the bike. He looked at me like I were a leper, and sped towards his own private sunset on his skeletal steel steed.

At times I get nostalgic and Google death percentages. Sometimes they relate to that formative incident - 3.2% of deaths in the last year have been caused by alcohol, so I can factor that into my friend’s chances, at the time, of surviving it. Drowning, I have no idea, but a night when one falls into a canal is perhaps a night on which one is particularly susceptible to it. And then one has to look at the percentage, if there is one, of actually getting pneumonia or some other ailment. I take a look up at the flight of stairs leading to the motorised haven of Leicester’s high streets. The bank of the conduit is redolent of the highly pedestrianized air possessed by grand European cities; Amsterdam, Brussels, Venice - they too with a penchant for canals. If I walk steadily, the percentage for drowning will be low. But if I affect a hobble – and at this point I do just this, stutteringly stepping ever-closer towards the edge like a crab on ketamine. But before I take the tumble, an epiphany spreads its light upon the breadth of my person. One day – perhaps as soon as 30 years’ time – the big fire will come (not Biblical rapture, dummy; global warming) and the earth, the universe will no longer be inhabitable. Humanity will certainly be extinct.  But who drove it to this state? Which force in the world, which dominant species is especially gifted with an aptitude for killing and maiming, and creating great beasts of arms and technology, finance and private property that they can be subordinate to, which too can choke life from just about anything that’s got it?

I race up the stairway. “Out of my way!” I say, pushing a hardened bruiser in a manner that ought to add a few fucking per cent to my own Prognostic Sentience Measurement.

“You fucking what, you fucking muggleshitcunt?” he bellows in a manner that, whilst deep, sonorous and extremely authoritative, is not exactly Churchillian; more like Winstonian, as in Ray Winstone. “Where the fuck you going?”

“Come and get me, Ray!” I squeal with delight.

“I’ll fucking kill your slag shit cunt family!” His meaty slabs of leg pulverise the steps as he pursues me.

But if he can find my slag shit cunt family, good luck to him, for the real point of his ire is gone. The traffic halts, lining up into an informal motorcade, as I leap jauntily into the centre of the road and, screaming “ONE HUNDRED PER CENT!” quite literally launch myself upon the muscular bonnet of one of those superfluous military-style trucks beloved of the quintessential suburban bourgeois family. Something’s odd here, I ponder, as my blood spools around my crooked ground-level profile. I try to communicate my query to my inadvertent killer, but they are breathily protesting that “I didn’t have time to brake!” and other banalities. But I’ve seen the jeep, and suspicions are high. It belongs to the old friends of my parents. Maybe they’ve come to take me back – eternity in Surrey must be my destiny, farmed off by these C-of-E berry-growers in their bomb-squad ride. What else, I ask you, could they be doing in Leicester?