Duration 2.25

Starling Fallanx, singer, firework-enthusiast, wanderer, collector of berets, bird-hats and cardboard-boxes, authority on the nightingale, was struck down by the VUE near a late-flowering hawthorn bush on the road into the Manifold Valley.

Starling met Allia just eight hours after the VUE. They were both suffering from sore feet. After considerable wanderings, with or without the VUE's disorienteering experience, Starling moved into the Tyddyn-Corn Farm with her children, her hats and her cardboard boxes, when Allia became the Fourth Custodian of the Boulder Orchard.

Perhaps finding it difficult to cripple a moving target, the VUE's interest in Starling Fallanx has been sporadic. But now that she has settled, she can no longer taste salt, open her eyes under water, wear velvet next to her skin or smell hawthorn blossom. But she is still able to teach her daughters to whistle the thirty-two songs of the nightingale and astonish them by locking her Achilles tendons to grip apples with the soles of her feet.

Of all the VUE's attributes Starling felt the most, and, at the same time, the least enthusiastic about, was immortality. Barring accident she would undoubtedly outlive her daughters and her grand-daughters. As to her great-great-grand-daughters, her kinship and influence would be so diluted that she could scarcely claim a relationship. She ought by then to be back on the road, maybe starting another family elsewhere. There would be numerable chances to begin again.

On the long drive to dances and distant jazz-clubs, Starling kept an eagle eye on the fields looking for scarecrows, the only site to be buried in, it was said, if a VUE victim wished to terminate a relationship with birds.

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Note: Throughout the biography Starling sings a different-worded version of The Lady is a Tramp. Some of the lines are:

She goes to the opera and she knows every line

She goes to Shakespeare and thinks him fine

She likes to go swimming down in Abersoch Bay

She goes to the Eisteddfod and she stays wide awake