All the Single Ladies in Peterborough

The paddleboat swans are forming up for attack. I am in Peterborough, a normally intriguing city beset, like the rest of the country, with a thick, bleak, expressionless gray cloud like a bad children's diorama. The young artist has fashioned a crafty brown cobblestone quarter, full of shops and garden-walls, churches, and a cathedral, but he has underscored his whole effort by the backdrop made of too few thinly-stretched cotton balls fastened to the shoebox with bottles and bottles of rubber cement. I think we'd all rather a few clouds fall out of the sky than have a frownyface sky like we've had, with the thick snow and ice it has brought that is finally melting away.

However, none of this changes the large "V" of white-feathered fowl advancing resolutely across the glassy water as if I were a piece of helpless and cornered waterborne plantlife. The few colorful and brown mallards are looking around as the armada passes them going, "Huh? Huh?"

They gather their bulk formation at the foot of the cycling path, their not-runners'-feet churning humorously beneath the surface. They are looking at me and saying, in their own way, "Sir, won't you give us some vittles?" Yes, swans speak a little like the guy at the beginning of "David Copperfield" (this is England, after all). They stare at me for minutes, then they realize I have no bread, and they are disheartened. I am amused.

Eventually, one of them rolls its swan eyes at me and says, "Lame!" It rolls its neck and head to the side like a troubled teenager and begins to move through the group while they are still trasnfixed on me, the cruel American who dared come to the shore without vittles. Eventually, one by one, they file after the leader, going away from me, hoping the woman pushing the stroller across the way has brought appropriate vittles to the river's edge.

I'm not sure whether to call this leader-swan Magellan, for its decisive leadership and in honor of the book I'm reading (Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe [!]) or Beyonce, for its limber, defiant neck and trend-setting characteristics. Its gender a mystery to me, I think--since it is pretty and did not first befriend me, then try to convert me, and finally and rashly burn my village--that said swan is more likely "bootylicious" than the commander of the biggest maritime voyage of its time, and with a funny beard. This is my logic, but it is not law; oh, and Katherine of Aragon is buried in Peterborough, and the city is close to our circuit, both are why I came in the first place, and, having eaten lunch in Thirlby, why I brought no vittles. The swans were a bonus.