Remarkable bums
Truro, Cornwall
I know it’s a grey wagtail because of the colour.
Yellow. Bright yellow. Lemon yellow. Rubber duck yellow. Brazil’s shirt at the 1970 World Cup yellow.
Yes, it’s a satisfying shade of grey on top, but when you see a grey wagtail, you’re only talking about its yellow backside.
When it came to naming the grey wagtail, ‘yellow wagtail’ had already been snaffled for the, admittedly yellower, umm, yellow wagtail1.
But that yellow bum is the grey wagtail’s remarkable feature, so not remarking on it is a bit like calling the White Cliffs of Dover the Cliffs of Dover, or The Beatles singing that “we all live in a submarine”.
To avoid confusion with the yellow wagtail, it’s been suggested that the grey wagtail be renamed the river wagtail, because they tend to be seen around fast-flowing water.
Now, I don’t want to keep finding fault with names, but the water I’m seeing this grey wagtail around is anything but fast flowing.
Where there’s water there’s plastic, and the start of Truro’s leat system, a kind of miniature canal below the steep, winding paths that circle the bandstand in Victoria Gardens, is littered with energy drink bottles, salad pots and sushi packaging. The water is green and still, but the grey wagtail is yellow and busy, snacking on insects.
The leat system runs throughout the city centre in channels created in Victorian times to provide water for thirsty horses and street cleaning, but it doesn’t flow as freely today and is often dry.
Truro was a port, but much of its water is out of sight now. A 10-minute walk away from Victoria Gardens is Lemon Quay2, where boats would moor alongside the buildings to unload their cargo. It was covered over 100 years ago, then became a car park and is now a plaza, but the Truro River continues to rise and fall with the tide under the feet of the Primark shoppers, Wetherspoon’s drinkers and Hall for Cornwall theatre-goers.
In 2011, two years before Miley Cyrus made being naked on a wrecking ball cool/cringeworthy, sexy/scandalous, The Drummer rolled onto Lemon Quay. The Drummer is a 15ft-tall tin and copper statue of a nude man banging a drum while prancing on a huge ball.
“It’s pornography and I’m actually quite disgusted by it,” a shopper named Nina told the BBC at the time.
To be fair, Nina, the worst is covered by the drum. The only foot-long sausage on show on Lemon Quay is when the big German food stall arrives for the Christmas market.
Another shopper, Lesley, asked: “What’s it got to do with Cornwall? There’s some deep-rooted meaning in it isn’t there, that nobody is ever going to understand.”
To sculptor Tim Shaw, the banging of the drum celebrates the steely resilience of Cornwall’s miners and fishermen, while the ball represents the sea, earth, moon, the circular paving on the plaza, a sea buoy and the globe across which many Cornish people migrated. Got it, Lesley?
It’s a grey and damp Thursday afternoon, and Lemon Quay is largely deserted apart from me, the pigeons and gulls, but I find myself falling into step behind an old lady pushing her shopping trolley along. As we pass The Drummer, she pauses at the rear end, looks up and says, “You looked better in real life”, then shuffles on.
It seems I’m not the only one recognising someone from their remarkable bum today3.
Basking sharks seen on this walk: 0
Total basking sharks seen to date: 0
Imagine how grumpy Marmaduke Tunstall must have been – and I imagine someone called Marmaduke Tunstall to be generally grumpy – when he came to name this bird in 1771 and found that 13 years earlier Carl Linnaeus had already used Motacilla flava (golden-yellow wagtail). So he chose Motacilla cinerea (ash-grey wagtail).
Named after mine owner and MP Sir William Lemon (1748–1824), not the fruit, nor the grey wagtail’s bum.
I’ve found no suggestion of who, if anyone, The Drummer was modelled on. “No anatomical part of it was modelled on me,” said Queen drummer Roger Taylor as he unveiled the statue. So we can cross him off her list.
Lovely writing.
And just like that I have beef with the yellow wagtail