Tea With The Birds

1006 Words5 Pages
“Tea with the birds” is a short story by Joanne Harris. It was first published in Sainsbury’s Magazine in 2001 and appeared in Jigs and Reels, Doubleday, 2004. Joanne Harris is a British author and one of her most successful works is the story Chocolat. The life in a contemporary city is often stressful, noisy and crowded. People living in the city find it hard to take time to relax and enjoy life, in stead they tend to rush around constantly and no one generally spares time to get to know the people surrounding them. The cities are constantly changing and developing and most people automatically adjust to these changes, while others fail to adjust to these changes and these people are left behind. As cities expand so does the anonymity among its citizens. A lot of people find themselves utterly secluded from their surroundings and the main part of their lives is marked by solitude and loneliness. “Tea with the birds” deals with the subject of being lonely in a cold and shallow, but still crowded place. The main character is also the first person narrator of the short story. I assume the main character is a woman because she works as a waitress and people presume she is a nurse student – the fact that people think she is a nurse student also indicate that she must be relatively young. The story takes place in Mortimer Street – a place where no one seems to know anybody but their own little family even though it is crammed. The main character thinks of herself as an outsider, who does not want any social contact with anyone. She has not talked to anyone since she moved in and it does not bother her, in fact she is happy about it. She feels different from the people living in her neighbourhood and she knows how they talk about her behind her back, but this too, does not seem to bother her either. Though the character’s life is solitude, she does not express
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