SEAN THE SWAN WRANGLER

‘Sean, you fuck’ was how he was known, and how he thought of himself.

He’d lost his way. He needed a new direction. One that was his own; not anyone else’s, especially anyone else who referred to him as ‘Sean, you fuck.’  The days of name-calling were over. It was time for a new start.

He felt this desire for change standing in front of Leyton’s Londis noticeboard. One advert stood up and spoke to him: ‘Sean wanted for new post as Swan Wrangler on the River Lea’.

‘That’s fucking me,’ he shouted, but then felt better of the ‘f’ word. ‘I’ve done with that fu**ing word. That’s me: I’m Sean, the Swan Wrangler.’

The next day he was on the towpath being instructed on how to lasso a swan out of the river without damaging its neck or beak.

‘It’s not as easy as it looks, Sean,’ cautioned the instructor.

‘It doesn’t look fuc… flipping easy.’

‘You need to talk to a swan softly to set it at ease, then come at it as if you were wearing carpet slippers and velvet gloves.’

‘Like a cat?’

‘Not exactly, but I can tell you’ve got the right idea.’

The first weeks in the job were not easy for Sean or the swans. But once he started to think less ‘cat’ and more of himself as ‘Sean, the slipper-wearing swan wrangler,’ he injured less swans and began to see himself in a whole new light.

Others saw it too, and when hooligans now called to him from the bank as he wrestled with swans in the river below, they no longer shouted, ‘Sean, you fuck,’ but shouted ‘Sean, you flipping swan wrangler!’

‘Flipping’ is what he heard or chose to hear, and it always made him smile.

*Drawing by Jonny Voss