Status Updates From Wakening the Crow

'Soon the room was warm and fragrant, and me and Chloe, together we could shuffle books and move boxes and open a packet of chocolate biscuits, and, behind the dark-brown voices of Radio 4 drifting down to us from the kitchen, we could hear the traffic going by outside. People going to work. Other people, not me.'

Always a magpie churring and chuntering through the blackened twigs of the hawthorn hedges... and gulls, the resourceful inland gulls, a mob of them, tumbling and somersaulting and soaring in the wintry sky, so far from the sea and yet thriving and voicing the triumph of their success with a never-ceasing cackling and laughter.