Within birding circles certain topics evoke huge feeling like you would not believe. The three following small words contain a huge amount of meaning if you're of a certain age, which I'm not, being still very youthful and devil-may-care. They are slender, billed, and Curlew. Away back in 1998, away up in Northumberland, what may or may not have been a bit of a runty Curlew was found. Proclaimed as a Slender-billed Curlew, a species near extinction, many twitchers moved heaven and earth to get up there and see it for themselves. Some managed it, some didn't. And as you can imagine this provoked a highly partisan debate about whether it was one or not. Whether or not this debate was split evenly down the lines of who saw it and who didn't I cannot possibly say. Suffice it to say that the bird got accepted by the various committees that exist in order to make decisions on these things, and those who saw it tucked it away on their British lists whilst sticking two fingers up at those who didn't see it and weren't keen on it being one. From what I can gather, righteous indignation reigned.
For years.
Even now Druridge Bay's Wikipedia entry makes mention of it, and the bird itself has a full page! But today, in the latest twist to this long-running saga, it was formally kicked off the list again, a mere 15 years later!. Also kicked off again was the longest running BirdForum thread in the history of the universe, which was started in 2008 as a ten year anniversary "celebration" of the arrival of the bird. Birders have long memories, and year after year the debate rumbled on. If I may summarise briefly....
"Is!"
"Is not!"
"Is!"
"Is not!"
.....
It was at its most active in the first two years, which saw 38 out of the [current] 55 pages, and 2011 was still pretty good, contributing a further 13. Thereafter it slowly declined, including an unforgiveable break of eight months until a mild awakening in February 2012. Perhaps some of the protagonists grew up? It then limped on for another few pages to October 2012, and until today had lain tragically dormant. But in the space of only a few hours we now have another three pages, and the top-class entertainment of watching grown men squabble over something massively inconsequential, err sorry, I meant over a matter of life and death, can begin all over again. Hurrah!
Funnily enough I was recently contacted by an American journalist wanting to find out about birding extremes in the UK. Whilst I am almost certainly not the person she actually needs to be talking to, her timing could not have been better. All she has to do is read 1,355 posts and she will know all she needs to know.
A small whinge from me to all blog readers, twitter followers, and anyone else who may be vaguely interested. This kind of follows from my post the other day as to whether you know me or not. So, with that preamble out of the way, here is some shocking news. I am not evil. No, really, I'm not. However I do work in a bank. Such dichotomy, how can that possibly be true? I have been known to voice opinions, some real ones, some in jest. However the speed with which my job is rolled out and laid before me as an accusation can sometimes be astonishing. It need not even be a vaguely inflammatory blog post like the one based on Kevin or Nigel or whatever his name was. For instance this week I tweeted a piece of news that I felt needed retweeting, which is that our wonderful badger-slaughtering government (you will perhaps note another apparent dichotomy here) were seeking to reduce fuel poverty statistics simply by redefining what counted as fuel poverty. This is clearly outrageous, so outrageous I didn't even feel I needed to say it. I'd barely pressed send before an unknown Twitterite rolled out my career again. To be fair, he later apologised, realising he had gotten the wrong end of the proverbial stick, but it's still a valid example of quite how prejudiced people can be. Yesterday I moaned about people wanting to rob me on Ebay, and joked about there being no honest people left in the world. Guess what got rolled out? Maybe it too was a joke? I don't know, but as the saying goes, we are not amused.
I am not a political person, nor a religious person, so most of the time I avoid getting involved in either. On issues I feel strongly about, such as port-swilling toffs slaughtering our wildlife, or the massacring of badgers by a blatant collusion between our so-called public servants and the priggish landowners to whom they are beholden, I do occasionally comment (until I get sick of it), but obviously I steer well clear of perpetuating absurd stereotypes. On the whole though I do not feel strongly enough about many issues at all, and religion and politics are both huge turn offs. I've yet to be called saintly, but any Toryboy label people might like to slap on me is hugely wide of the mark. Then again, as you may have gathered, neither am I a left wing activist noted for my charity work. I lean in no direction and would quite honestly rather not vote for any of them. Any implied connection between where I work and how I might vote is mind-crushingly simplistic.
I do believe strongly in some things though. I believe in hard work and being rewarded for it, and I do not like layabouts or scroungers. These two facts do not make me Margaret Thatcher. However, and here's the big problem, in addition to the above I work in a bank. Oh dear, I must be scum. No? Well, you may have guessed I don't see it quite that way. Rather than this be the crime of the century, this is an entirely normal career, and close to 300,000 other people in London do the same thing. It is called working for a living, and I do not deserve to be castigated for it. Neither do the vast majority of the 300,000 other people. Clearly banks of the kind that I worked for, and continue to work for, are not softly softly charitable organisations with a focus on cuddly animals and social justice, but that does not make me evil. If the banks all disappeared tomorrow, many things that many people take for granted would cease to occur - they're not a necessary evil, they are simply necessary. That the actions of a few people can cause an entire system to come crashing down, and cause ripples across the whole of the labour market impacting people who don't even work in banks is I something I don't really understand, and it sounds very unfair that it could happen. I'm not going to apologise for it though, because guess what, it wasn't actually my fault, and simply working in the industry does not, contrary to popular opinion, make me somehow guilty by association. I do not know a single cigar-smoking, Ferrari-driving, bow-tie wearing, cocktail-swilling person of the sort perceived to have caused the financial crisis, the same crisis that if you recall cost me my own job quite quickly. I work in a team of entirely normal people who are decent human beings that I would share a beer with all day long, and probably so would you if you met them. I have made a conscious choice of where to work in order to fund, amongst other things, a house for my family to live in, which last time I checked is also entirely normal. My choice of work is based entirely on sound economic reasoning. I would love a 9-5 job, and I would adore a 10-4 job, but I have yet to find one that supports my cocaine habit. Nonetheless I reserve the right to constantly moan about how hard I work. Mainly simply because I enjoy moaning.
Here's what I wanted to say about three paragraphs ago. Please do not fling the term "banker" at me as some kind of pejorative put down. It's ill-informed, ignorant, and an insult both to me and your own intelligence. By all means criticise me for being arrogant, rude and intolerant. This is good for me, and will make me a better person. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go pick up my Helicopter which was in for servicing. I worked from home today, but I need it for the daily commute tomorrow.
The internet is a funny old place as we all know. A couple of days ago I replaced my dead surround sound system, and seeing as there was nothing wrong with the speakers, only the actual electronic bit, I decided to try and recoup a bit of cash by flogging them. I'm not a big Ebay user, but what the hell, stick them on and see what happens. There were five of them, so on they go at 99p a throw - up for a week, any return at all is a result as the only other thing I would do with them is keep them in a cupboard for a decade before throwing them out.
So I dutifully photographed them, weighed them for a postage estimate, worked out what they were called and started the auctions off. I was very careful to specify UK only, as I can't be bothered with resolving any kind of foreign dispute with the kind of chancer you often get on Ebay. With ten minutes I had a question asking me what the shipping to Portugal was. I replied back answering "a million pounds", with the number in digits beside it so they got the idea. No bids from that person yet. A few minute later, with all five speakers still on 99p, I get another query. "How much for all five? I'll offer £150". Why ask, I ask, if you're going to offer? No reply from that person either. Since then, the queries have been coming in thick and fast. How much for two? How much for three? How much for all five, along with various low-ball offers. Having received a few queries and pseudo offers, I decided to look up how much these things normally went for - a lot more than £30 each it transpires. Cheeky so and so.
I've given up answering the questions, everybody just wants something for nothing. And anyway, the fundamental point is that is an auction. You offer what you're prepared to pay, and if somebody is prepared to pay more than you are then you don't get them. How difficult can it be? I didn't use the "Buy-it-now" option, so what are these people hoping to achieve exactly? I've come to the conclusion that there are no honest people left in the world. This perhaps sounds harsh on the basis of trying to flog five small speakers for the last four days, but honestly. Would these same people go into a shop and try the same thing? Hello mate! Those five speakers that you've got in the window for £350, can I have them for £150? Why yes, you certainly can! Do you need a shirt as well, as for only £200 extra I can give you the one off my back!!
This will be the last time I use Ebay, next time I am going to give the whole lot to Barnardos.
Nothing doing today. Ideal. A pleasant stroll round Wanstead Park today, still loads of leaves on the trees, which made for some pleasant reflections. Officially it's winter, but it didn't look or feel like it. When will it start to bite I wonder? I'm content for now.
Sorry not this blog. Did you think I might? I might indeed, but it is still helpful. No, what I mean is that the birds keep on coming. I thought I was safe this weekend. I needed to be safe, I wanted to be at home. And what happens? I'll tell you what happens! A bleedin' Ivory Gull flies past a bit of north-eastern coastline is what happens. Now before you go all "but you don't have to go", you're quite right. I don't. And I would not have done. But the thought of what is out there is irritating. I would much rather that nothing were out there until I am good and ready, which is not this weekend.
So what have I been doing? Well, it has been very exciting. Exciting and annoying. The highlight of the weekend so far, other than the 2004 St Joseph, has been the installation of a new surround sound system in the front room. This will come as a surprise as I'm not a big TV watcher. The last time I knowingly watched TV was probably the 2012 Olympics, but I do enjoy the odd DVD, or whatever the format is these days. As such I have one of those systems where you have speaker behind your left ear, and another behind your right. It died about two years ago, and replacing it has remained very low on my list of priorities since then. However about a month ago I bought a fridge blackboard. Mainly this was for Mrs L's benefit, to act as a constant reminder of all the boring things (i.e. not to do with music in any way) that she had to do, and that had remained close to the bottom of any metaphorical list she might keep. In other words, close to the top of the list that I keep for her. However any time I so much as mentioned anything on it, this had the capacity to start a chain reaction of small explosions culminating in mention of the fact that she had just been on the cusp of doing something, but now that I had mentioned it she was damned if she was doing it. Thus nothing ever gets done.
Enter the Blackboard of Unhappiness. To keep things fair, I also wrote a pile of the things I was least interested in doing on it, and one of these was to replace the speakers. You would think that most blokes would relish a task such as this, the chance to do a pile of research on electronic gadgets, and then do a spot of tinkering - screwdrivers at the ready. However I am not most blokes, and installing a home cinema system holds practically no interest for me whatsoever. As such I've happily lived without the magic of Dolby 5:1 for quite some time. But I had to go and write it on the blackboard didn't I, and there it gnawed at me, until yesterday I finally caved, and ordered some damn thing on Amazon as part of their Black Friday deals. It arrived today.
I didn't hold out much hope of being able to correctly install it, but my mood cheered when I discovered that the brackets on the old speakers had exactly the same thread as the new ones. Despite my native stupidity, the thing actually worked first time - idiot proof I think they call it, nicely referred to as plug and play. Nonetheless taking the old one out (found several spiders, a missing mitten, several nerf gun bullets and a coloured-in tennis ball) and sticking the new one in took the entire morning. The big annoyance, as eluded to above, was discovering right at the very end that the cable for the furthest-away speaker was approximately 45cm too short, and thus rather than the wire being neatly hidden by the picture rail, there is a little bit of corner cutting..... Fuck it, it works, and if I'm looking at the telly I can't see it as it's behind my head. And anyway, I spend next to no time in that room anyway so who cares? Mrs L cares, but she knows how ill-equipped I am for this sort of task and seems fairly relieved that nothing went too drastically wrong as at one point I did have a hammer out.
To end, here are two questions:
1) Can you guess what the first DVD on this afternoon was?
2) I've now rubbed out most of my tasks on the blackboard. Can you guess who hasn't?
Do you think you know me? I mean, from reading this do you think you understand who I am, what makes me tick, what I don't like and so on? This is purely exploratory you understand, I am trying to gauge if people who read internet material feel that they have a personal connection with those who have an internet persona that choose to express themselves there. Like me, though the question is more general than that. Do you think you know anyone whose web output you consume? I have a reading list of regular bloggers over on the right hand side. Some of them I do know, some of them I've never ever met. Do I think I know them? Well yes and no.
When someone writes, a certain amount of them finds its way onto the page. It's inevitable, and I challenge anybody to create an internet persona entirely unassociated with their true self. When I say anybody, really I mean birders. Birders tend not to be professional writers who could pull this off, as by definition they base themselves too much in fact. Though interestingly fiction vs non-fiction arguments frequently take up acres of web birding space...
Personally, I write fairly familiarly, lots of "yous", lots of directed sentences, in so far as the written word is ever direct. I also write a lot, more, perhaps, than many people out there who use this medium. So do you know me better than other bloggers? I tend not to shy away from making my feelings known, and I don't suspect anyone would ever call me enigmatic, but still? Can you really say that yeah, that bloke from Wanstead, yeah I reckon I've got the measure of him.
This question came up on various blogs a couple of weeks ago, during Duskygate and coincidentally coinciding with one of my more aggressive periods. I never ended up writing much about the suppression in Devon, I simply didn't know enough about it. Usually this doesn't stop me, in some cases it encourages me, but a little bit of introspection caused me to mostly hold fire on that particular incident, which was probably for the best. But would you have discovered anything else about me? Or about the circumstances surrounding the Thrush?! I'd wager no on both counts.
Do you read this and this and think "bad case of OCD"? If you read this, or read the drivel I slap on Twitter, do you think that is the whole of me? Keyboards do funny things to people for sure, but there is so much on the internet that you just can't be sure about it. Thinking about it another way, those of you that have jobs, would you send an email to a colleague in the same way that you might compose a thread on an internet forum? I wouldn't. I'm a completely different person at work. Not necessarily serious all of the time, but with a certain amount of gravitas and grumpiness that is necessary when managing a team of people in a tough environment. So, do my colleagues know me? Does my boss? Do the people that report to me? The me at work is once again very different from the me on the net, or the me at home, though I have been known to get mixed up and start giving my children deliverables when I get in.
All I am trying to say is that so much communication happens online that it's easy to get confused between the internet and real people. Those who you might think you "know", you probably don't, so judge accordingly. Don't take everything you read on the computer seriously, no matter how difficult that might be. And above all, make sure your life contains real people. If it all gets a bit much, one response to the confusion that often reigns online is to give the whole lot the elbow, even for a short while. That's exactly what one well known blogger has done. Again. Difficult no doubt, but it's only a couple of clicks away. Are you brave enough? Goodbye digital me, goodbye digital others. Tough call, but I'm going to base myself in the real world for a while. And that should remind me, recalibrate me, as to what it's actually all about. Perhaps I should try it?
Everyone likes birds, but many people are afraid to admit it. Let's face it, whilst not taboo per se, it doesn't exactly mark one out as being down with the kids, the life and soul of the party etc. If you like birds and make that fact know, you're automatically a little bit odd. The over-used term "twitcher" is laid at your feet, and from there on in you are less of a person. I hesitate to say "saddo", but......
This explains why there are not a huge number of active birders, you know, the ones that you sometimes encounter in your local park or in the countryside, dressed in green and looking extremely nerdy. People like me in other words (although at the moment I am mostly wearing black) that inhabit a strange world of keeping lists, latin binomials, feather names, and sub-species (oh the irony). People with sometimes little appreciation for what others think of them. "I like birds, so what? I don't care what anyone thinks of me. Which is also why I don't wash my hair. Or clothes. Fuck off."
But behind closed doors is a vast army of birdwatchers. RSPB calendars and a set of binoculars on the living room windowsill. "Oh, no, I'm not a birdwatcher. I just like looking at them." Quite simply, they are in denial. Closet birdwatchers. And in the modern vernacular, they need to come out. And why not, the Pope is not interested, and the law is on your side. What we need is birdwatchers anonymous meetings, hosted by someone wearing an anorak and saying that everything is going to be alright. For the sake of this post, I will wear the anorak - though naturally I would not be seen dead in one. Who do you think I am, some kind of geek etc etc.....
Cut to a room with a circle of chairs
Me: Welcome everyone, I hope you've all been wearing your bins in public?!
a chorus of silence and looking at the floor
Me: We have a new member today called Emma (not her real name hem hem). Emma would like to tell you about how she came to realise she was a secret birdwatcher.
Emma*: Hello everyone! [Emma is a very outgoing person]. For many years I tried to hide the fact that I am a secret bird-lover, but unfortunately I have a blog that does not lie.
[weak applause]
Me: Emma that's brilliant, so what birdwatching activities have you been doing?
Emma: Well apart from watching internet webcams that intrude into the lives of Owls for 85 hours a day, I did get pair of binoculars for my 68th birthday.
[more weak applause]
BA member: But you do not look a day over 55!
Emma: Fuck off.
Me: OK, moving on, have you taken your new binoculars outside yet so that people can see that you are no longer in denial?
Emma: [shudders] Ugh. Outside? Why would I want to do that? I can see the birds from indoors, which is as close as I want to get to them, and anyway they are not Owls.
BA member: Owls?
Emma: No. They are small and brown and very far away and even though they are not on a screen I am still sufficiently competent to know that they are not Owls. Though beyond that I have no real clue.
BA member: Why do you like Owls so much?
Emma: Have you seen Owl-in-a-box? It is a life-chang.....
Me: Well unfortunately that's all we have time for. Well done Emma for coming out! We're all here to support you on your birding journey.
[applause]
* any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental etc etc. On a completely unrelated note, I am [not so] secretly very very amused that a certain owl-loving resident of Belgium has finally come clean (sort of) and is well on the way to buying an anorak.
