‘Life as a creative genius is no bed of roses’: my week as a nightingale

Don’t get me started on critics. A true creative artist has no time for them. OK, we’ve been misunderstood and misrepresented for centuries: but for me what matters is the music. Only and ever the music. What else should matter to a nightingale?

Monday

I prefer to sing at night. The competition has mostly shut up: it’s hard work singing through a haze of wrens and chiffchaffs and other substandard performers. It was a still night: you could have heard me a mile away. What’s more, someone did. Someone who actually matters.

Tuesday

I’ve heard it all. They say a nightingale has a repertoire of 250 phrases made from 600 units of song. Nonsense! I’ve got far more than that. I’m a composer and a performer and every song I sing is a world premiere. Don’t try to restrict me. It’s not about arithmetic. It’s about music.

Wednesday

Think about it. Singing all day and all night is seriously hard work. Even if I was singing rubbish the performance would show how fit and strong I am. But I don’t sing rubbish. Every song is brilliant, inventive and new. It has to be, because it gets judged by the only critics who matter. And believe me, they know what they’re listening to and what they’re listening for. Certainly Monday’s all-nighter won over one of those critics and we’re now established very sweetly in the heart of a hazel coppice. From now on I will sing not to woo but to defend.

Thursday

Our song goes way beyond the target audience. It bewitches humans as well as the occasional nightingale hen. There’s the duffer who listened to one of us on Hampstead Heath in 1819. He said his nightingale sang as it flew away. Pah! No nightingale ever sang in flight in all of history. Johnny-boy was faking it. And then there’s the American who wrote our song down as “twit twit twit jug jug jug jug jug jug”. If that’s truly what he heard, no wonder he thinks April is the cruellest month. And none of us ever sang in Berkeley Square either: much too urban.

Friday

Though the real pain in the cloaca is that reductionist garbage. The idea that we sing to establish a territory, to attract a mate. Sure, that’s what happens when we sing, but it’s not why we sing. Take a human example: did Jimi Hendrix play the guitar so he could mate with lots of chicks? No. He played because he was a great musician, and everything else just followed. It’s the same with me. If you won’t take my word for it, ask a certain hen.

Saturday

Things are going well in our coppice. England is a hard land for a nightingale but we’re doing all right. Less need for me to sing now, more important to forage. But I’ll still sing a bit. Never mind function: I’m a musician and I get lost in the music. It’s as though I lived on song.

*As told to Simon Barnes

Photograph by Alamy