“In Britain, killing a swan still generates unexamined outrage: It is wounding the body politic, a thing akin to treason. The symbolism of swans is so commonly understood in Britain — emblems of the monarchy, and by extension the nation — that these birds have long been counters in the game of what is us and what is not. Perceived threats to swans closely track the imagined enemies of British society. All the swans on the Thames, or so one story goes, were killed by Cromwell’s soldiers during the Civil War, and the river was restocked only with the restoration of the monarchy. Mournful 19th-century obituaries for Old Jack, the swan who lived at the seat of the monarch at Old Buckingham House, relate how his decades-long reign over his pond was brought to an untimely end by a gang of warlike Polish geese. A 19th-century magazine article claimed that swans in the royal parks were killed and skinned and their remains tied to trees by Jewish feather traders.”
- Helen MacDonald, writer of a book about birds that I really enjoyed in 2015, writes in the NY Times magazine about the long-standing tradition of capturing and tagging (for the Queen! and some now-obscure guilds!) swans on the Thames river. I was in the UK at Christmas, and chatted with a Canadian friend who’d been living in Edinburgh for almost a decade. She had recently relocated to London, and was having trouble dealing with its Londonness, its englishness.
That conversation had me thinking about Brexit, identity, and England’s englishness. It’s the only part of the UK that doesn’t have its own devolved parliament, and is at leastlow-level loathed in most other parts of the country. I feel like MacDonald is trying to find an englishness that isn’t just this:
