Ian McMillan's missed moment that has turned him all philosophor

I just saw the idea of it because by the time she’d seen it and said the word ‘Kingfisher!’ it had gone. For a moment, for about the length of time it took the bird to escape my field of vision, I thought about pretending that I’d seen it too, but what would be the point of that? As far as birds go, you’ve either spotted them or you haven’t and there’s no real point reporting a false sighting. If you did that it would only be a matter of time before you recorded Golden Eagles and Great Bustards on the bird table in your garden.

Manvers Lake is a fascinating place to see (or not see) a kingfisher. Years ago there was a coking plant nearby, and a coal mine, and vast marshalling yards for coal trains. Since the pits shut the area has been transformed and now people sail and swim and fish on and in and around the gleaming water and, unseen by me, kingfishers flit by.

I have to admit that that night in bed I kept thinking about the kingfisher. It became one of those ‘what if’ moments that haunt you and stop you sleeping. What if I had turned my head just a little more quickly? What if I hadn’t been checking Twitter on my phone at the time? What if I’d not been distracted momentarily by that barking dog? I laid there and as sleep refused to stride in through the bedroom door and settle on me the kingfisher got bigger and bigger util it was as big an eagle, a kingfisher of the mind.

It's funny how things invade your imagination and won’t let go. The kingfisher became a symbol of all the times in my life that something had passed me by and, because I’m a writer, it made me think about the times I’d pounded my brain to try and put something elusive into language and it flapped by and I never noticed it to write it down. Those are the times you worry about, when the poetry bird flies by un-noticed even though its plumage is dazzling and its wings are so similar that they almost rhyme.

But then, just before I drifted off into a sleep that I decided in advance was going to be broken and fitful, I heard the weird otherworldly sound of an owl hooting. Just once. Hoot. A single note that hung in the air momentarily and then the night returned to silence. My wife was asleep; she’d not heard the owl and for a moment I felt a kind of tit-for-tat superiority. I missed the kingfisher but she missed the owl. Now I was wide awake waiting for the owl to hoot again, but nothing came.

I thought about that old adage ‘If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ In other words, what if nobody saw the Kingfisher, were its colours still just as bright and if nobody heard the owl, was there a hoot? Well, maybe; but this time I heard it and in some way it compensated for the lack of kingfisher.

Maybe that’s the lesson: if you miss the coloured feathers, you’ll hear the hoot. It needs work, but I’ve got the start of an aphorism there.