Duration 2.36

Castral Fallvernon, curator of photographs and keeper of pictures for the VUE Commission, lives and works in a disused aircraft on the outfield at Heathrow.

Three years after the Violent Unknown Event, in a bid to aid those VUE victims afflicted with a variety of avian paranoias, Castral approached the London Airport Authority for help in developing an extensive rehabilitation programme based on visual stimulation.

Translator: "Sleep in the tail, breakfast over the wing, office up front, lounge in the cockpit. Legolas Varda bought me a mynah bird."

Within six months Castral could offer a prospectus which included bird-recognition therapy, exercise in a flight simulator, lepidoptery, ornithological taxidermy and freefall parachuting. Progressing patients are assessed by their reaction to graded visual material prepared on tapes, slides and film, accompanied by a great deal of specially composed music, full use of the VUE languages and a wealth of bird anecdote. Filmstrip seventeen was a favourite project with apparently considerable curative properties. It had certainly introduced Castral to her husband, who as a self-styled flier, modelled himself on William Cody, and until the treatment of filmstrip seventeen, was persecuted with the thought that an eventual attack from the air would blind him.

Castral's appreciation of the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds and the Value of Personalised Flight was equivocal and could be typified perhaps by her copy of the Da Vinci flying machine. Aircraft vibration had loosened one of the drawing-pins that held it to the wall and the picture had swung round so that the flying machine flew upside down. Castral had not seen fit to put it back the right way up. The pictures that made up filmstrip seventeen were taken from a very early collection of black and white photographs of birds kept in zoos. Most of the photographs had been very heavily retouched. In some cases, they had been virtually recreated with a brush. Maybe this refashioning characteristic was instrumental in the filmstrip's high success rate. Either that or patients were intimidated by the eye of the marabou stork. The timorous may have identified Castral herself with that stern eye. She had no room for failures.