Swordfish and Ospreys - Another Ramble

A few people have asked me "Why the name Swordfish".

The truth is that I closed my eyes, cleared my mind and let the first thing swim in.  The aim was to choose something in a symbolic and archetypal manner rather than a logical manner.

I could explain the choice in many different ways but the validation of picking a good symbol is that it will easily morph its meaning as the circumstances change.

I could wax lyrical about the two elements of the name i.e. the Sword, which is symbolic of the mental faculty and the fish which, amongst other things,  is symbolic of death (change) and resurrection (Christians will identify with that as it is the symbol that early Christianity associated with Jesus).

I could go on forever about this subject but it is irrelevant.  Right now I am interested in the characteristic of the Swordfish that encourages it to dive deeply and quickly when under attack.  Sometimes it even spears its nose into the sea bed.

Last month was akin to that.  Bad news forced me to go deeper and took me down quickly and forcefully.  I have gained from the journey back up where there is time to reconcile events, learn from them and enjoy swimming in calmer waters for the time being.

Now I am not the family's great observer of nature.  That mantle is shared between my father and my sister.

As I have journeyed through this illness I have felt more affinity with simple aspects of nature even if it is just watching the wildlife whilst out in the back garden.  I have even found myself watching a few nature programmes recently.  Nature programmes are something that I will watch if they are on and they are well produced, but I even found myself recording one a few nights ago.

So there I was with Kitten last night watching a programme called "Wild Wales".  Ten years ago I might have been hoping that it was a programme about the underground party scene but here I was watching a programme about Chuffs in Angelsea, different types of moss (which I thought was stretching it a bit far) but then the beautiful osprey.

The osprey is a creature that I have admired since childhood.  Not that I have spent much time thinking about it, but I remember seeing footage of it catching fish in Scotland.  I had always associated this bird with Scotland;  I think that when I saw the original footage many years ago there were six pairs of the birds in Scotland and that efforts were being made to encourage a growth in the population.

Of course the closest I have been to Ospreys recently is watching the eponymous Welsh rugby team on the tele and I always wondered why a team would be named after a bird that isn't native to Wales.

The programme put me straight.  Ospreys started to "settle" (they are migratory) in Wales in around 2004 and have a growing presence.  The filming of the bird for the Wild Wales programme was on the estuary at Port Meirion, which is famous itself as the village in which the original cult 1960's series "The Prisoner" was filmed.  The village is now widely known beyond this particular slice of infamy, but again it has relevance to this blog because of a missed opportunity to go there.

I have thought many times about staying in Port Meirion but my one concrete opportunity to go there was missed, somewhat ironically, when I chose to walk up Cadair Idris instead.  Cadair Idris is the mountain that I have mentioned several times on this blog and on the day in question I chose to venture with Gandalf, Bee and Beard instead of my parents Cymraes, Grumpy my sister Tricky Crow and brother-in-law Dumbledore the four of whom were off to visit the "Prisoner Village".

Anyway back to Wild Wales and the osprey.   The footage of the osprey taught me something new, as all of the previous footage I had seen of the bird hunting was of it swooping in at an angle to the water and hooking the fish out of the water.  I did not know that they mostly hover and then plunge down into the water, a sort of attack form of the Swordfish's defence characteristic.

So what is the point of this ramble through Wild Wales?  Well it is simply that at this time I am digging and digging deeper and I guess that will be reflected in some of my posts over the next period. 

Unlike July though I am descending in attack and not in defence.