Don't you wish you could fly? Funny how in
our dreams we know how to do it. Maybe it comes from our experience of
looking off high buildings, or down from aeroplanes. Here’s a dizzying picture I took from a cable car in
Barcelona in the summer:
Or maybe our knowledge of flying is buried
somewhere in our DNA? Michael Symmons Roberts touches on that idea in his
poem 'Mapping the Genome':
Somewhere
out there are remnants
of
our evolution, genes for how
to
fly south, sense a storm
hunt
at night, how to harden
your
flesh into hide or scales.
(You can read the whole poem here:
When I was a little girl my sisters and I used to
make ourselves cardboard wings and pretend we could fly. Or we’d jump off high walls in our Robin Hood
cloaks, hoping to get airborne that way.
But no. Part of me has never
quite given up hope. Maybe in
Heaven? Well, the next best thing was to
create characters who can fly; hence the Gull people in Wolf Tide. Here’s what my
heroine Anabara says about it:
‘…it wasn’t really hard work. Not if you were
small and light. No worse than running down hill with the wind behind you.
Nothing beat that rush. Like diving upward into an airy sea. Rooftops, here we
come!’