Don’t tread on the duck eggs
Writing Hunter-Gatherer
Pre-save Hunter-Gatherer - which will be released on 25.07.25
It’s March 2020 and the world is inside. Grounded, we wait for answers, instructions, and for this all to end.
I’m staying with family in South London and the road outside their house, which is usually roaring with ceaseless motorised activity, is eerily quiet. When I walk along the pavement for my ring fenced window of movement, the sound of my footsteps is a surprise. A backing singer who’s finally got a solo.
Society is bewildered. We contort ourselves into shapes of adaptation. Loneliness ebbs and flows through individuals and communities on rivers of rising sales of cheap wine. Every day we watch the numbers climb, flatten, descend, climb, flatten.
Nature moves fast. It doesn’t need petrol or diesel to jumpstart back to life. Swiftly, eagerly, the skies begin to clear. Fish replenish urban waterways, rediscovering currents and slipstreams which have long been too murky to swim through, to breathe within. There’s so much you can now see. It’s a welcome, almost fantastical-feeling subplot in an otherwise dystopian melodrama.
Without thousands of boats, daily churning up Venice’s canals, marine life has begun to dominate again, as the water’s sludgy, greyish tinge clarifies. There is talk of dolphins, skimming, dipping, playing in the canals. We think we see videos. This is later exposed as misinformation, or misappropriated fact: the videos are actually of dolphins in Sardinia. But it’s a plausible myth which adds sparkle to this moment of dismay, anxiety and confusion. While human health is in disarray, the rest of nature appears to be thriving. Not knowing how long this will last makes these Good News stories a temporary salve for a spooky, unknown wound.
This will be about writing a song, bear with me – it’s all estuaries to the ocean.
There’s that rather clunky (I think) meditation metaphor about thoughts being ‘like passing cars’. You can just observe them, passively, and choose to let them drive on; not allow yourself to fixate, or be defined by them. They’re only thoughts, not facts. And there’s a clear difference, isn’t there?
At that time, the fewer actual cars that passed outside my window, the less mental traffic filled my head. Things lost urgency and currency to me, and true priorities rose from the depths of the bullshit which had polluted them, and under which I had a tendency to submerge them, to a bluer surface, filtering out old concerns as they rose.
Within my own, private swathe of silence, a quiet voice dared to speak. It told me something I already knew; thoughts which felt like facts.
I was supposed to have a theatre production happening in the next few months, one which never materialised. This meant I could apply to the Arts Council for a small amount of money which I would have received if it had gone ahead. When this arrived in my account, I gratefully put some aside (for the elongating string of days to come), and was certain what I had to do with the rest.
Keen first to tackle my ignorance, I messaged a musician friend —
(Many thanks to this friend — I decided to leave out crediting you but I am happy to reveal your identity if you want xox)
I dutifully followed his advice and placed an order in a few, brief clicks. While I waited for my soundworld to arrive in the post, I cracked on with the tools and time I had available.
My huge, musical bus of a keyboard, bought from eBay years before, was waiting for me. The kind with thousands of effects and rhythms which unspool spontaneously and quite overwhelmingly at your naive fingertips. Words and a melody were emerging. I hastily plugged it in, the blue light flashed on. Impatient to tether and tease inspiration down from what always feels like the sky into my body. I fiddled around with the settings, searching for the right synth.
Soft euphoria. The rhythm of my feet on the pavement. Bright blue light, glowing in my box room. The two metres of space between my body and yours. Chords swelled, curling up close to lyrics, shapeshifting into rhyming phrases, finding form. A musical March of Progress. I’m reminded of bodies, sharing sweat, rippling under flashing lights in heavy darkness. The release of dancing alone in togetherness.
I think of Venice. Venetians draped in postures of fear and incredulity, some singing opera from their balconies. Unbothered cormorants diving expertly for fish they can now see. Their kills are quicker. At the Piazzale Roma vaporetto stop, ducks have made a nest. Someone has put up a sign to preserve their little fluffy lives, Don’t tread on the duck eggs. Protect growing life. Save lives.
Yearning for connection, deep in my solitude this song comes. I address a conjured Hunter-Gatherer, who can surely tell me what it was about the pre-pandemic, city-soaked lifestyle I was living that was making me feel so separate from the giant and indescribably intricate web of animal life, of which I am part.
We are penned and hemmed in and I feel a wildness start and writhe inside me. For now, all it has is my voice, pen and notebook, and an it-will-do-for-now keyboard synth, as its means of primal release. Nature is resourceful.
I’m losing touch with my roots
I can’t feel them
Always in fight, fight, or freeze
Intrigued? Have a sneak preview listen to the finished track :)
Four years later, I rewrote the song to be the second track on my first EP, Lost Romantic.
Today, I look ahead of me at a weekend which I hope will be filled with other bodies, sharing sweat, rippling under flashing lights in heavy darkness. And in all the places I find connection, and feel the sometimes simply blissful sensation of being alive, there is still a hard-edged, persistent bass-line, as alive as my own heartbeat. That bass-line is a question: insistent, repeating. A question which, as I write this piece and comb back through the years from now to then, I try to answer.
How did we get here?
In 2025, threats to our feelings of connection with one another and to the natural world are algorithmically programmed and financially incentivised. Rising loneliness is spoken about as if it is separate from austerity, and from the accelerating tirade of technological dominance, swapping looking around in curiosity with blinking, blinkered, at our screens. Hateful fiction is repackaged as watertight fact, and it is hard, at a glance, to realise the difference.
The humanitarian crises the world is facing are enmeshed with the destruction of our planet. Fewer than 15% of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are on track to be achieved by 2030. A handful of very rich men in sheltered rooms are actively profiting from our divides, and determined to further entrench them. Despite constant civil action against such blatant injustice, for woefully overlong, greed and self-interest have gone unchecked, unmitigated, unpunished.
There are quiet and loud ways to resist. Hundreds of thousands, millions of feet pound pavements in protest. This will not stop until these men are held, until they hold themselves, to account.
This will not happen while the entirety of Venice can be hired for one rich man’s birthday.
When we protest together, eat together, laugh and cry together, dance together, we remind ourselves that our solidarity as a species makes us wild, and makes us civilised. Through loving each other and listening, really listening, we remember that we are part of life’s entangled web. We relearn truths forgotten. We rewild ourselves.
Making music is my small offering to these big, beautiful truths. My first single, Hunter-Gatherer, comes out on 25th July. Obviously it would be amazing if an orca brought me a gift to say thank you for this banging tune, but as the chances of that are currently unlikely, I will settle with kind human beings pre-saving it :)
Dance with me, if you are so compelled…Just mind that you Don’t tread on the duck eggs.
Love, Poesie x
Pre-save Hunter-Gatherer - which will be released on 25.07.25
Written & Performed by Eloïse Poulton
Produced & Mixed by Fionn Connolly
Mastered by Emily Magpie
