In Search of the Jazz Cockerel

Ben Wildsmith

First off, they don’t go ‘cock-a-doodle-do’, do they? The world over, regardless of geography or culture, the male Galliforme announces his terrifying, sexually-obsessed entry into the day with ‘ugh-ee-urrr-urrr!’

This pre-dawn ejaculation employs such a turgid melody as to dispel any notion of romance in his ambitions. The brute imposes his base intentions upon our slumber, as we dream, perhaps, of the finer aspects of life on this sweet, swinging sphere.

We like to dot around a bit on holiday, staying a couple of nights in a location before hopping on a boat or bus to somewhere new. This week, in Kalymnos, I was awakened one morning in Myrties, and the next in Emborios, by exactly the same sound crashing into my sleepytime imaginings. One moment I was mounting the podium to accept my Nobel award, the next I was blinking into the half-born day as the guttural screaming of a priapic chicken shook the village.

Can’t you sing something else, I thought, while last night’s tzatziki swilled ominously around my stomach afloat a sea of house white.

Sex and sausage rolls

‘Ugh-ee-urrr-urrr!’ came the answer, reflecting the inevitable uniformity of a world driven by desire. From the doof, doof, doof of AI-written dance music, to the blue and orange tyranny of Greggs on every High Street, life is battered into familiar shapes through which our primal needs – sex and sausage rolls – are marketed to us. I’ve come here to get away from all that, so the cockerel’s connivance in it was unwelcome. They need to raise their game.

Emborios is the last village on the island. You meander round to it on a coastal road that takes you past the towering cliffs where climbers from all over the world come to test themselves against nature and feel part of it.

Below them, the road takes you past a series of u-shaped coves where the sun glitters across gently lapping, turquoise water. Each seems more tempting than the last. Emborios, though, has an extra layer of wonder to offer. Off its narrow beach there are a handful of islets which have a smudged, indistinct quality against the overwhelming blue of sea and sky that frames them. You could convince yourself that you were imagining these, or that they might evaporate if you blinked.

In one of the family tavernas that sit back from the beach, we fell into conversation with the elegant, elder lady who presided.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed, ‘our home is heaven on earth. They put in moorings for large yachts, but we had them out! What is the money they would bring if we lost that?’ she asked.

Goat bells

After breakfast, we went walking up the hillside, where the clanking of goat bells charmed us on in the fiercer heat of midday. Pottering down a steep road back to the coast we found another cove with a beachside taverna staffed by a guy in piratey clothes. Being yet more remote, it moved me to go swimming, so I bared my Baywatch ripples to the gentle breeze and dithered across the rocks until it was deep enough to float.

Bobbing around there, free of by elections, Nigel Farage, a looming book deadline, and pain from my wrecked knees, I felt an ascent of the spirit.

‘Life is a glimpse at nature’s wonders,’ my dad once said.

Suddenly, a chugging sound disturbed the peace. Behind me in the Aegean, a multi-million pound white catamaran with blacked-out windows was approaching in my direction. I flinched towards the shore, not scrambling but concerned at the direction of this wealthy interloper. For a moment, I fretted I would be wiped out by the encroachment of hedge funds, beach clubs, Gucci loafers, and the gentrification of everything. Chug, chug, chug….

I shouldn’t have worried.

The pirate stood on the beach outside his little, eccentric slice of the world and told them.

‘No! Turn around. Not here!’

The pristine vessel did as it was told, leaving me to my harmless splashing and the taverna to its honest living.