Nothing happened on the south bank on Friday. That is the whole of the report, and the gazette will stand behind every word of it. A pond on a day like this is not news. It is, for a few hours, only itself. Your correspondent rose at the second honk, asked no question that might have yielded an answer, and can confirm, by evening, that none was yielded.
The older drakes were not at the western station. They were not there at the first look, nor the second, nor the third, and at the third your correspondent gave up counting empty reeds and left them to wherever they had got to. Some other corner of the pond, on business nobody thought to report. Or a Friday simply declined, the way a Friday can be. The station sat empty. The shaded spot they keep through the warmer afternoons sat undisturbed, waiting all morning on birds who never came down to use it.
The bread line at the East Bank stood at five. That is five birds in the line, by the count of a drake who crossed that way in the late morning. It is not the crust index, on which readers are referred to Monday’s editorial. Five, the drake noted, is the smallest figure a line can carry and still be called a line. He had thought about joining it. He had then worked out that one more bird makes six, and decided six was more line than the morning required. He went on his way. The arithmetic stands on its own.
The heron held at the west pier. It did not move, not once, across the whole of the watch your correspondent kept on the pier from the eastern bank. The dabchicks were down at the seaward end. The eldest of them was busy with something at the water’s edge, near enough to see and too far to name, and it goes unnamed here. No statement came. None had been looked for.
The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice spent the late morning at the principal humidity gauge, writing the day’s reading into her notebook in the unhurried hand your correspondent has watched her keep at that gauge all season. What the reading was, at that distance, none of us could make out. She did not look up. The Warden was not at the sluice. He had not been there the day before, nor the day before that, and the gazette has at last stopped reporting his absence as though it were the kind of thing that counts as new.
The breeze never came. The afternoon held the shape it had woken in. The willow stirred its leaves now and then, at intervals the gazette declines to call a pattern on this little evidence. One small sound carried up from the southern waters around the fifth honk, the frog or a fish or the water alone, and it was not heard again.
Your correspondent left at the sixth honk. The bank was as uncrowded as it had been at first light. There was no matter before the desk today, and it is closed.
The cool of the day did the filing. Some Fridays improve by holding exactly still.