I THINK I have had an epiphany recently, but I am still thinking about it. It was about birds. The word ‘epiphany’ is not much used at the breakfast table, but assorted writers have had them, or claimed to have had them. James Joyce had them. William Blake had them, but – unpretentiously – called them ‘fancies’. Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Yeats had them, or something akin to them. An epiphany is more than an insight or an inspiration, which are positive. It is more like a revelation. The Bible has a whole book of them, and some of them are pretty scary, as was mine. When the veils are ripped off the mundane, what you see may well be confronting. Think of the Anglican Dean Swift writing in Catholic, conquered Ireland: ‘The other day I saw a woman flayed, and I have never seen anyone whose appearance was so improved for the worse’. The bite of this spare observation comes from the way in which several implied value systems come into violent collision: concepts of humanity, male respect for the gentler sex, his Christian role, the need to maintain public order in a repressive and fragile colonial society always on the boil and in constant danger of eruption, and the power of social institutions of which he was a part and a beneficiary.

My epiphany was modest, but still confronting. As I said, it was about birds, which have often been instruments of epiphany, from Greek tragedy (The Birds) to Edgar Allan Poe's raven, Coleridge's albatross, even Blake's Fancy: ‘How do you know that every bird that cuts the aery way is a whole world of delight, Closed off by our senses five?’