Six Weeks

Six weeks. Twenty posts. That's the size of it, that's the minimum requirement. I was on a bit of a roll, it seemed easily achievable. And then I went away, a birding trip to Ecuador, and all thought of writing ebbed away. Vanished in a maelstom of Tanagers and Antpittas. This is no bad thing of course, and in itself I expect the trip to provide around eight posts. This therefore leaves 12, of which these inane ramblings are one.

I actually have a handful of short weekends to cover before I get to Ecuador; I am undecided if I will bother. There was a weekend on the west coast of Ireland with Mick, a weekend on Gibraltar with Rob, and also a trip to Santorini with Mrs L. I kind of feel I ought to. Especially now I have mentioned it. Ireland also has some highway robbery that I would like to shine a light on, when the Avis office in Shannon fraudulently deprived me of £150 or so. Scumbags. I have it all documented, and I felt sufficiently pissed off to write to the head of Avis in Europe detailing the crime. He of course ignored me, bastard, and I am really struggling with motivation to pursue it further. And I thought Ryanair were the thieves.... The money is irrelevant, the principle is everything, but I am busy and tired, and the initial incensed fire has died. Maybe typing it out here will rekindle the flame?

When in Rome

Gibraltar was fun. Initially billed as a vismig extravaganza it turned out to be far from that. Instead Rob and I walked miles and miles in search of birds - any birds - which were in short supply. Lots of steep climbs, hurty knees and ankles. Somewhat of a bucket list destination. Very few birds but strangely satisfying. I am sure it is worth a few paragraphs. 

Where could it be?

Santorini was excellent. I tend not to document short trips a deux with Mrs L, they are often fairly extravagent and may not sit that well. But this was oh so photogenic. We are not of the Instagram generation, but we had a lot of fun watching young people for whom this is clearly very important. Indeed their entire raison d'être, it must be exhausting. We were content to spend many hours gazing out at the caldera, eating seafood and drinking Assyrtiko until it came out of our ears. Somehow I eked out 27 birds along the way, including a migrating Wheatear on Thirasia on our way back from Mikra Thira. Oh go on then....

And now that I think about it there was a weekend in Barcelona and a weekend in Lyon as well. But this is a blog about birding in Wanstead and I wouldn't want people to get confused.....

The heating is on!

I was away last week, another jaunt that will hit your screens in due course. Cheer you up. It was a lot wetter than here, but for the most part a lot warmer. And a lot of fun. I got home on Sunday morning, Mrs L was out, and the house was like a tomb. Silent and cold. Oh so very cold. I have various temperature sensors spread around the place in order to monitor plants and wine - critical. The lowest of these displayed 12 degrees. It was only 9 in the greenhouse! We had not yet turned on the heating, and so over the last month or so the house has gradually cooled down. We do not have a tumble dryer, and Mrs L had complained to me on the family whatsapp channel that her clothes were not drying. She had hung them up outside and the permanent fog of the last few days had ensured that they had come inside wetter than when they had gone out. Back inside and they were still damp two days later and risked needing being washed again. It was time.

Would the central heating work? It hasn't been used since about March, possibly before. I had meant to conduct a test when plumbers were still available for less that £1000 an hour but had never got round to it. Mañana mañana. Thankfully it fired up first time, and whilst I can't say the house is cozy at this point it is nothing that a jumper cannot cope with. And the airer next to the radiator in the hall is now functioning as intended; Mrs L has retreated into her lair.

I don't follow energy prices by the minute, but you would have to have been living under a rock not to know that they are going up. They always go up. They might go down briefly in the summer when nobody is using very much, but by the time you actually need it in any quantity then bam, up it goes. Thanks Vlad. Thanks Donald. You hear about how much scarcer it is as a commodity, how much more expensive it is to source from alernative sources, and then you see the energy companies' profits soar and wonder if you are not being sold a massive lie. Shouldn't profits remain stable or even decline with higher wholesale prices? I think so, yet corporate greed ensures they balloon and there is nothing you or I can do about it. Vote with our feet? Pointless. You can go and live as a hermit in a cave or you can live with a miserable wife. Far easier to pay up. Last year my summer monthly bill doubled in January and managed to nearly triple in February which tends to always be the coldest month. And by then you are fed up of winter and that sod it button seems so much easier to press. In 2027 prices are expected to be 17% higher than in 2026. Excellent, excellent.

I've been round the house bleeding the radiators and indeed turning some of them off in lesser used wings. The thermostat tops out at 19 degrees but I am sure I did all this last winter and was still hit with a £500 bill. Better start saving. Meanwhile interest rates just went up, no young people can get jobs or buy houses, and we are being told to hoard baked beans. 2027 is shaping up to be a bundle of fun. The nature of my work, and to a certain extent my age, shields me against quite a lot of this - the big expenses in my life are nearly behind me. But I nonetheless have an underlying sense of unease that I find hard to express, and those in charge seem to be cultivating this unease rather than reassuring people. This is not....reassuring.

It just seems to be one thing after another. Without wishing to go all biblical the words war and pestilence keep coming to mind. These manifest in the modern world as pandemics, financial crises, terrorism, general instability and massive uncertainty. War I suppose is war, at least I don't have to fight in one. I think the other two in the Book of Revelation are famine and death. Maybe those translate as the more or less continuous cost of living crisis and an abysmal state of mental health? Who knows, but it is difficult to remain especially positive. Unless you read this blog of course where it is said that people unfailingly come away with a kind of glowing aura and remain of a sunny disposition for the rest of the day if not week. What's that you say? More trip reports?

Scilly Pelagics Part 2

On Sunday we were back on the Sapphire at 8am, with Bob electing in yet more flat calm weather to see what might be going to the north-east of the islands. Much the same as the prior day was the answer to that question, but we lucked out on our second tuna boil. This is when a school of Bluefin Tuna pin down a shoal of anchovies or smaller fish and circle them whilst lunging in. There are ever more Tuna in the Atlantic these days, the news has had several articles about this and I witnessed it first hand. Whilst the first major feeding frenzy dissipated before we could reach it, the prey exhausted, we managed to the second one in good time. It was like being in the middle of a wildlife documentary, simply incredible. The water does indeed boil, white froth and aquamarine blue as the silver-grey tuna, huge fish, cut through the smaller fish, which exploded out of the water in bursts as they tried to escape. Most of the time you just see the tall, sharp cuved dorsal fins, but at times they're half out of the water, a frenzy of energy, speed and death; the air and surface of the water sparkle with the scales of the decimated anchovies. And of course above it all are the Gulls, hundreds of them - this is what you see from a distance, a concentrated crowding of birds. There are Manx Shearwater in the boil too, and Shags, the whole thing is a simply an incredible. Often it is over very quickly, but we lucked out this time. Photography can't really describe how intense it is.

Atlantic Bluefin Tuna

European Shag

European Shag

On this trip we had another two Great Shearwater, at least eight Wilson's and also eight European Storm-Petrels, a couple of Bonxie and good numbers of Manx Shearwater. One of the first Wilson's we encountered was a much smaller bird, with much quicker wingbeats. It felt like a light and small bird. Per Bob there is a school of thought that thinks indivudals of this type come from a distinct population in the Falklands that along with birds from South Georgia may in the future be treated separately from birds that breed on the South American mainland. I am not claiming even an armchair insurance tick at this stage, but it really did feel different, so who knows. I've kept a note. Again great views of everything but due to the conditions low numbers of the good stuff - i.e. big Shearwaters were very thin on the ground - you can have pelagic trips where you see hundreds so two felt like slim pickings. 

Sooty Shearwater

Round Island

Once back on dry land we birded the Garrison and then Peninnis Head - here we added Meadow Pipit and a lone Sand Martin to the ever-growing list. Then back to the tent for another feast and more nice wine - it been a great idea to bring something decent down with us, the offerings at the Co-Op were not really up to scratch.

Wren

Song Thrush

In the morning - now Monday - we did a big circuit of the southern part of St Mary's - through Lower Moors again, back to Porth Hellick, and then around the coast below the airfield and back to the Garrison. We missed the boat to St Agnes by a few minutes and thus missed out on a White-rumped Sandpiper, but Plan A had always been to remortgage our houses in order to go to Tresco as this had a few different birds. We had plenty of time to get over there, do a big walk around the Great Pool and make it back to St Mary's for some lunch before our final pelagic left at 5pm.

Porthcressa Beach

My dream garden

Another dream garden, this time on Tresco just north of the Abbey

Tresco was great. The western end of the Great Pool had Lapwing, Green Sandpiper, Common Sandpiper, Wood Sandpiper, Redshank and Greenshank. The smaller pool at the eastern end had seven Little Egret. We walked back to the boat via the main track to the Abbey, its famous trees largely destroyed by the same winter storm that had done for the Mermaid back in January, a sad sight. Some of the trees had stood for decades but most were felled, including the historic Monterey Cypress that had been there for a hundred years. I'd not been to the island for many years, but it seemed a shell of what it had been. Hopefully they replant, ideally with 100% Araucarias - as an aside I had not realised that the Norfolk Island Pine is viable in Cornwall and on the Scillies in particular, there were some lovely specimens, and the cracks in the dry stone walls were filled with succulents. Hopefully London becomes like this.

Combined age of passengers: c80,000

We left Tresco at the right time. A large Saga cruise had turned up and was in the process of depositing a procession of wizened old people on the island. As we wound our way down to Carn Near a long line of cruise ship passengers were shuffling up in the opposite direction. There was a good chance the Abbey Gardens would run out of tea and cake. And defibrillators.

We had a late lunch at the Atlantic and then set out once more, this time to the south. Finally there was a bit of wind and this meant more birds. By now I had my sea legs so even though it was considerably more bumpy I didn't have a problem with it. We had a least 11 Wilson's Storm-Petrel and around 25 European Storm-Petrel. Apart from these though it never really happened for us and we returned to port without the mega vagrant from the South Atlantic. But look at the views we got! Remember that a Storm-Petrel is smaller than a Starling! Back to the Garrison for a final cook-up and the last bottle of wine before crashing out. There is something very tiring about being on a boat.

European Storm Petrel

European Storm Petrel

It was now Tuesday. On reflection it would have been a better decision to have only done three pelagics, finishing on Sunday. This would have allowed us to get the Scillonian back on Sunday evening and be back in London for the early hours of Monday and get to work. This would then have been just one day of holiday - the Friday - and would have saved two nights of camping on Sunday and Monday nights, That final Monday pelagic hadn't added any birds but had meant taking two more days of holiday which I hadn't really considered at the time.

Porth Hellick

Airfield

We had the entire morning to bird St Mary's and so repeated the southern circuit at a more leisurely pace, trying to make a short list an every eBird pin - there are loads. With the late summer high sat over the whole of the UK it wasn't a great surprise that we saw the same birds (probably exactly the same birds) as on all of the prior days, but it was extremely pleasant in the warm sunshine. Shirt sleeve birding in beautiful scenery and you can't argue with that. You can see the appeal, it's just lovely. I think Mrs L would really like it down here if she can get over the boat trip. Maybe the Scillonian IV will be the game changer? So very nice but also very quiet, I think we added Kingfisher at Porth Hellick but that was about it.

Song Thrush

 

Scilly Pelagics Part 1

When Rob floated the idea of going down to the Scillies for the annual late summer birders pelagics I was in two minds. My only prior experience of a true pelagic trip was (I think) the last ever pelagic trip the Scillonian III did. It never featured here as it was in August 2008, before this blog existed. I remember being violently ill for most of the day in a force 7 gale, sleeping quite a lot, and not being able to get on the one and only Wilson’s Storm-Petrel that appeared in the slick briefly. Not that great! Wilson’s Storm-Petrel has remained a gap on my list ever since. They are seen from land more these days, a function of more birds in our region, but my days of driving down to Porthgwarra on the strength of a good forecast are long behind me. So when Rob mentioned he was thinking about it I really wanted to go and really didn’t want to go. As you will have guessed by now hope triumphed over experience.

I booked the tickets, £350 for four trips on consecutive days. Two full days and two half days. Expensive as a single outlay, but also on a per hour basis pretty decent. That of course was before I’d added on petrol to Cornwall and back, a night in the Premier Inn at Bodmin ahead of the crossing, the Scillonian to get over there (a foot passenger return was £240 or thereabouts!!), and four nights on St Mary’s. This latter expense is even more ludicrous than the ferry, so egregious that the only option that felt even remotely realistic was camping on the Garrison. I suppose people must pay it, but self-catering accommodation or bed and breakfast on the Scillies is simply outrageous. It shouldn’t be allowed, no wonder people eschew holidays in the UK. I didn’t really notice it adding up as it was a series of disparate expenses paid at different times, but later it dawned on me that I’d spent £1000 before even a sip of beer at The Atlantic had passed my lips. And this was camping! Jeez.

However I cannot deny that it was very pleasant, a simply lovely place, magical even. Then again think what else you could do with a grand, where you could go (pretty much anywhere), and that is what for me puts it into perspective. Anyway it is done now, a sunk cost, water under the Sapphire's hull. But that Wilson’s Petrel is by far and away my most expensive tick ever.

Porthgwarra from the Scillonian

We left on a Thursday night after work, Rob patiently waiting for me to finish when he could have left much earlier. We broke the journey in Bristol in order to do a bit of colouring-in and arrived in Bodmin close to midnight, the last guests to check-in to what was a completely full hotel. Clearly not everyone is that sensitive to price. Or maybe it’s that there are no options and you have to suck it up? I slept for what felt like a millisecond and was up early for the short hop down to Penzance, enough time to pop into the Hayle to get the trip list off to a start. Then to the park and ride to dump the car before getting down to the harbour. And there she was, the Scillonian III, an old rust bucket in her last season before she retires and the Vietnamese-built Scillonian IV takes her place. The new boat will shaves an hour off the crossing apparently – not sure this fully appeals to birders who view the trip as integral part of the experience.

The Scillonian III docked at St Mary's

Hugh Town Bay

We left our luggage near the Garrison crate; we would not need to pick it up, it would get taken straight to the camp site. An excellent service but remember you can fly to anywhere in Europe for less! It was a lovely day, and although we had both taken our motion sickness pills they were probably not going to be needed. All in the mind anyway. Picking a spot on deck we settled down to what we hoped would be a legendary crossing in terms of rarities. Ha! As if. Nothing of note, too calm, too sunny, a few rafts of Manx Shearwater and some point and some Med Gulls near Penzance. Indeed this was the forecast for the entire weekend. Hopefully Bob Flood and the crew of the Sapphire would be able to pull something out of the bag despite these conditions, especially, I hoped, small Petrels with dangly legs. Mega seabirds from southern oceans were probably off the cards but you don’t know until you try!

We arrived on St Mary’s at the ideal time for lunch. The Mermaid is closed, possibly permanently, after a winter storm earlier this year flooded it so instead we went to the Atlantic. I don’t know if Stugeron is supposed to be taken with Proper Job but I tried it anyway as the water looked like a mill pond. The pub was doing a roaring trade but there was plenty of room. After a nice little lunch we did some shopping for provisions at the Co-Op and then walked up the Garrison. We had booked a pre-pitched tent will full amenities rather than taking our own. This was double the price, but still a fraction of bricks and mortar accommodation. An enormous tent with three sleeping “rooms” with inflatable mattresses, a big “living room”, and a porch which contained a stove. We also had a table, chairs, a picnic bench, a cool box that we could replenish with icepack from the freezer at reception, and our own Song Thrush. Into this went the four bottles of wine I had judiciously brought with me. Meursault, Cote-Rotie, Bourgogne Rouge and a Macon. I also brought two proper wine glasses, there is nothing worse than drinking wine out of a plastic beaker. If we were going to camp we were going to do it in style.

At about four-ish on Friday afternoon we sauntered down to the harbour. The MV Sapphire was waiting at the side, and a few birders were assembled, one in camo which I thought was quite endearing. Turns out this guy was Richard Stonier, a quasi-member of the team these days. Somehow stayed upright the whole trip with bins glued to his face with one hand and calling out birds, whilst methodically chucking chunks of bread into the wake with the other. His third hand dealt with a slow drip of some vile chemical that was essentially dynamite for tube-noses. Just as we were required to hand over our tickets Rob amusingly dropped his in the harbour. I took a photo of it as it floated away just in case this would mean the difference between Rob getting on the boat or sitting despondent on the quay as I sailed off, but luckily this was not strictly necessary as they had our names.

We headed out of the harbour and sailed around St Mary's to the waters to the east of the island. Once in position the skipper, Joe Pender, cut the engine and dumped a horrible basket of decomposed fish overboard. We then drifted away from the slick this created and watched the birds come in. Occasionally the engine was restarted to take us back up the now lengthy slick and closer to the birds. It took no time at all for a Wilson's Petrel to come in, it might even have been the first bird to do so. The oil forms a much calmer patch of water with barely a ripple, and the Storm-Petrels linger above it, skitting back and forth, up and down, dipping constantly as some disgusting morsel presents itself. Obviously it's helpful having one of the world's foremost seabird experts in the form of Bob Flood standing at the wheelhouse calling the birds as they come in, but the Wilson's are actually easy once you get your eye in. I think we had five of these and only two European Storm-Petrels on this particular outing, but the views were incredibly good as the birds passed the boat at close range. Photography was extremely hard - the autofocus on my little Sony box of tricks is impressive but wasn't fully up to the task. Or maybe that was me. Certainly Joe had no issues stood on the prow with a huge prime papping away - my issue was that if I let go of the side I tended to lurch somewhat - the sea was incredibly calm but a small boat sideways to the current nonetheless bounces around quite a bit. I did OK I felt, but having now had a play with my new A9ii how I wish I had purchased it earlier in the summer as I suspect my hit rate would have been significantly higher. No matter though, I was there to see the birds, and so nearly 18 years after I'd missed my one and only chance of Wilson's Petrel, I finally added it to my UK (and World as it happens) list, #462. Back in 2008 European Storm-Petrel had been #258. I've done a lot of birding between then and now, but this bird has always held a special place in my list of misses - it gets commoner every year seemingly yet I'd never really bothered with it, I guess I wasn't especially attracted by seeing a small distant speck from Pendeen or wherever. And I'm glad I hadn't, this was the way to see this bird. We also saw a Fin Whale on this trip and plenty of Short-beaked Common Dolphin. We returned to St Mary's elated, and at nearly 10pm returned to the Garrison to cook up a feast and demolish a bottle of Burgundy.

Manx Shearwater

Manx Shearwater

Wilson's Storm-Petrel

Wilson's Storm-Petrel

Wilson's Storm-Petrel

Fulmar

Wilson's Storm-Petrel

The next morning, Saturday, we were up early as always happens when camping. I am not a natural camper, but this had been reasonably comfortable and easy, as frankly it needed to be for £40 a night each! We noted a few birds around the tent including our remarkably friendly Song Thrush and a Blackbird that was only a little more reticent. Then it was down to the harbour again for our second pelagic, this time an all day affair. Joining the crew as before was Lily the Spaniel, on a constant circuit for food, or for Dolphins to make friends with. And also Higgo, that stalwart of all things Scilly. He had been on the Scillonian III pelagic in 2008, right at the back shovelling the chum with a huge grin on his face and he didn't seem to have changed very much at all. This time we headed south, once again in flat calm conditions, conditions in which seabirds that rely on wind to majestically transit the oceans simply sit on it instead. Yay! 

Collared Dove

There isn't much to tell, nearly seven hours at sea to the area known as Pol Bank picked up all the expected birds but numbers were very low - two Great Shearwater, two Cory's Shearwater - both sitting on the sea in rafts of Manx Shearwaters. There were five Sooty Shearwater along the way, and this time we had eight Wilson's and five Euro Stormies. I know that some reading this may think this sounds like a monster haul, five UK ticks in the space of a few hours perhaps, but given the counts I had seen from prior Sapphire trips this was actually slim pickings. Sorry if that sounds like ungrateful moaning! However it was also just a very nice day out. Many of these birds I had never had such good views of and it was great to be in out on the water in shirt sleeves. Sooty Shearwater in particular I find remarkable, the distances it travels versus where it breeds, it is incredible that we see it here. I suppose you can say the same about Arctic Tern. When you see a bird like this Canary Wharf feels very far away. Back on land Rob and I did a circuit of Lower Moors to try and build up the list a little bit, and ended up at Porth Hellick for an obliging Wood Sandpiper. The last bird I had seen at Lower Moors was a Black-and-White Warbler, back in 2011...

Shag

Lesser Black-backed Gull

Cory's Shearwater - the only pic I got

Great Shearwater

Sooty Shearwater

Lower Moors

Wood Sandpiper, Porth Hellick Pool

Continues in Part 2...

Fingers vs brain

Here’s another thing I have noticed about writing. My fingers can’t keep up with my brain. I touch type, kind of. I’ve never been taught to type but over the years I’ve developed a method that works. I suspect many people have. I’ve never really thought about it until now, as I type this. It seems my right hand – well, the thumb and the first two fingers – cover the entire keyboard right of the letter “T”, whereas the left hand is only responsible for letters to the left of the “T”, and really only involves the first two fingers. The only thing my right thumb seems to do is the space bar, the third finger of my left hand seems to be responsible for the shift key to get a capital letter, the fourth finger of my right hand seems to do nothing at all, I hold it curled in, and neither pinky finger does anything either. Backspace is covered by the third finger on my right hand, which being the longest can stretch that little bit further. Effectively I’m using four fingers and one thumb all the time, and occasionally another finger gets a look in. But sometimes, when my right hand is more concentrated on letters towards the right, “P” and “O” for instance, then I’ve noticed that the index finger of my left hand suddenly becomes responsible for the letter “T”. It is fascinating, there are probably studies and studies on it. I have never measured my speed and in any event, fascinating though it might well be, in my considered opinion this paragraph has now become incredibly boring. Wish I’d never started it. Plus it might be that I am squeezed into an airline seat and my elbows are in an unnatural position which might be altering how I type. I’ll let you know on that one later, once I’m sat at a desk.

This is not what I meant to write at all. What I meant to explore was that I regularly find that miss out words when I am typing. I do it at work in emails and I do it here too. Whenever I reread something I have written there is a better than even chance that I will discover that I have simply missed out a word. I hope I am not going senile. I like to think of it as my brain being simply too active and my fingers cannot keep up, which I why I went down a typing rabbit hole just then. But I also catch myself simply writing the wrong word. Generally these are words that sound like each other – write and right, think and thing, site and sight, things like that. Funnily enough it is rarely their vs there or ones like that, the classic ones that people get wrong simply because they don’t understand that there is actually a difference in the first place. His instead of he’s is one I see frequently, another example of the collision of phonetics and ignorance. I am not immune to it of course, nobody is. There was one in the last post which I spotted and corrected before I published it but I can’t now remember what is was other than it prompted me to write a note about it. It could have been work vs walk or something along those lines. All I know is that as I type I am speaking to myself in my head, composing a sentence slightly ahead of typing it, and I suppose I lose track. This whole speaking in your head constant inner monologue thing, when you actually stop and consider it, is incredibly strange whilst also being the most natural thing in the world. I would love to have some kind of implant that just formed the words on the screen as I thought them, or spoke them to myself. I suppose that dictation machines combined with modern technology do exactly that, I have not explored it. Maybe this laptop has such a function, where I speak and it “types”? It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, but I am not sure I would be able to use it as I am forever going back on myself, starting again, picking up somewhere in the middle and refining (ha!) a sentence. For what it is worth I never use spell checkers either, whatever I type that is what goes in. I generally pick up mistakes as I type them, but I am often surprised at what does get through when I reread a post. I am also not sure to what extent the software auto-corrects my mistakes, and if in fact I make a lot more than in fact get through. As I test I deliberately misspelled “make” in the last sentence and sure enough it got sorted out without any intervention on my part. “Sotred” instead of “sorted” was left uncorrected though, I have no idea why, but along with the missing words this is the kind of thing that I find whilst rereading recent posts and end up going back in and sorting out when time allows.

I suppose what might be sensible is leaving all posts in draft and doing the rereading before hitting publish but where’s the fun in that. Everyone gets to see my dumb mistakes, at least for a short period before I rewrite history. Future generations will not realise how inept I was.

Post-it notes for life

I’m sitting here wondering what to write. Somewhere on my desk back in London is a small yellow post-it note with an ongoing list of ideas I’ve had. Fun things, boring things, things I felt I might be able to string together more than a paragraph about. If ever I find myself on a desert island I need an inexhaustible supply of post-it notes. I use them at work too. Many senior people walk around with big diary-style notebooks; I am not one of them. I carry a small stack of post-it notes and a pencil. These form ongoing to-do lists just as they do at home. On them I write things I have to do that arise in meetings, things that I am going to get other people to do, questions I am going to ask people when I get back to my desk. The beauty is the size. It encourages brevity, it limits the amount of take-aways. No, sorry, can’t take on any more work, my post-it note is full. See? The best bit is like any to-do list. The end. When all things on it are crossed off it can be peeled off, scrumpled up, and thrown in the bin. A pristine sheet awaits. Endless possibilities.

This dates from 2016. I am on the road currently and this is the only example of the many thousands of post-it notes I appear to have ever photographed and saved down. I have no idea why. Perhaps it has featured before?

Anyway, my random scribbles are in London and I am on a plane, wondering what to write. This is how I was going to pass the time on a four hour flight to the Aegean. It is half term and Mrs L are off on another little jaunt, this time to Santorini, a place neither of us have ever been. It looks spectacular, even if the weather forecast is looking decidedly dodgy. Our room is one of those that looks out on the caldera, facing west. The sunsets are said to be magnificent however at this point it is questionable whether we will see the sun at all, let alone it setting. And this is why I have my laptop with me, in case we get stuck in our hotel room while a storm rages outside. I felt I might as well make some progress towards my annual blog total which is limping towards a hundred. I may or may not have mentioned this before but I get a sense of satisfaction from getting to three figures every year. I missed one year, didn’t realise until it was too late. It has annoyed me ever since.

Brazil helped a great deal, I got 11 posts out of it. Nice. As regular reader will be aware I write in fits and starts, as the mood takes me. A post every 3-4 days isn’t sustainable, I find it much easier to do nothing for weeks and then be dragged back to the keyboard by something akin to guilt. Actually it isn’t even that really, I don’t know what it is. I discovered long ago that there was no point fighting a reluctance to write. Just leave it, do something else, it will come back. It always does. Just as it is guaranteed to disappear again. A cycle of sorts, but one without a discernible rhythm.

Anyhow, with “par” at 3.65 I find myself at the end of October sitting just above 4. Earlier in the summer it wasn’t looking too good, closer to 4.5, but some semblance of coherence returned and now, with two months to run, I feel it’s recoverable. Twenty something posts are all that is needed. Doesn’t sound very much does it? All I need is a vein of form and I’ll be there in no time. And you, the poor reader, well you’re along for the ride wherever that may lead. Today it is about post-it notes, or at least that is how it started. Would you have predicted that?

I am sometimes surprised that I don’t get suggestions. Then again this is not YouTube, where every video no matter how short seems to contain multiple entreaties to “let me know in the comments below, if you enjoyed this video leave a like, and remember to subscribe to the channel for more content on X Y Z”. What is amazing is that this actually happens, screens and screens of it sometimes. I suppose that these are generally far more targeted, channels on specific topics that people care passionately about and are hugely invested in. That's not the case here, too varied, too unpredictable even though it isn't really. This must be something like the twentieth rehash of the "urge to write/why can't I write?" theme. Maybe if I stuck to birds? Hey, what?! I was trying to find something I'd written the other day and used a web search  - Google is actually far better at finding something specific than the search function within Blogger. When I googled whatever it was the little AI summary you get first up these days described Wansteadbirder as a travel blog.... Maybe these bots are more discerning that we think? Anyway, maybe if the scope were narrower. Then again I still think the issue is the length. Takes too long. What, five minutes? Ugh, I don't have that sort of time!! People think they're too busy. Only they're not. We have all just been conditioned over the last decade or so to have the attenion span of gnats. And then there's the format. Words on a page. Jeez, how antiquated. With videos the watcher can be getting along with something else at the same time. Multi-tasking whilst only half paying attention, an advantage (well, a disadvantage really) that the written word does not have. 

All that said I would likely ignore suggestions; I am very stubborn. What do I think about such and such? Who cares?! No no, I will just write about my various niche hobbies, just I have largely done for over fifteen years. Makes me happy, scratches some inner itch that I can’t explain. Words pour out, just like today in 12F. Paragraphs and paragraphs, the search for brevity goes on. The antithesis of the post-it note in many ways.