Birding

In a small seaside town, autumn is edging into winter, gulls ride winds over the white-capped water, and two women, strangers, pass each other on the promenade, as yet unaware of each other's existence. One hit wonder Lydia Lincoln has fled the city for the coast, after a self-serving apology from an abusive ex-lover throws her whole sense of her history and identity into flux. Uncomprehending, and angry, Lydia is trying to take solace in birds and beauty: to believe her future is alive with possibilities, even as her ex-bandmate and best friend Pandora drags her deeper into obsessively reassessing the past. Meanwhile mother and daughter Betty and Joyce, dressed identically, go about their unerring routines, daily playing out a claustrophobic co-dependency in their house of dolls. Their twin beds idle under matching flouncy satin counterpanes; but after lights out, middle-aged Joyce nurses teenage dreams of romance and escape. Caught between a past she doesn't understand and a future she can't imagine, Joyce can't speak to Betty about any of it. Although they don't know it yet, these women are all on a collision course and, in the coming hours and days, they will confront each other - and their own predicaments - head-on. Set against the bleak beauty of the British seaside - fish and chips and beauty parlours; bird hides, amusement arcades and bags of candyfloss - Birding takes the temperature of the female nation. A story about contemporary middle-age, about duty, consent, contrition and complicity; about the difference between love and obligation, and the boundary between unhealthy relationships and abusive ones, Birding asks what it might take for a woman with clipped wings to finally take flight.