Coronation Chicken

I am blaming the Coronation Chicken for all of my recent hardship. It is said that mass-catered events and airline food are the number one sources of dodgy tummies. I do enough of the second one to know that this isn't true, but I did go to wedding on Thursday and this is when my troubles began. Registry Office gallop at four, at the feeding trough by half past, Coronation Chicken down the hatch by five, some odd gurgling by eight.

Or maybe it was the A3? This poor excuse for a road had me driving round Sussex and Surrey country lanes at 1am with nary a diversion sign to be seen, and contributed to basically having no sleep that night and thus my body getting out of kilter. I am a very regular person, but not anymore..... Dammit I hate being sick, and having stomach issues is my least favourite type of illness. Give me a cough or a cold any day of the week. Friday morning was kind of OK, bar exhaustion, but by Friday evening I was having the kind of cramps that I hitherto only associated with Polonium 210. By Friday night I felt like I was having a baby, and most of Saturday was spent groaning. Sunday and I am at least up and about and able to twitch rare ducks, but it's now Monday morning and it has all gone pear-shaped again. How on earth one (well, maybe two) sandwiches can completely destroy my digestive system is anyone's guess, but everything has all ground to a depressing halt.

It would be unkind of me to share with you my exact symptoms, however when I arrive in Glasgow I will be shopping for prunes, kiwi fruit, and pro-biotic yogurts. Plus pot pourri and a sari. Jesus. Somehow I have to get through a day of meetings that have been especially organised for a functioning me. Not that type of functioning... I simply mean that an in pain, groaning and dashing to the loo me is somewhat sub-optimal in terms of what lies ahead. Perhaps the answer is to hold off on the prunes until the afternoon, but I am in urgent need of relief and I cannot wait that long. I am already wondering what can be cancelled and what time the hotel check-in opens so that the extravaganza can start.

Being ill is the absolute pits, luckily I am stoic enough to suffer in silence.

Evil

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.

Moaning and Migrants, by God.

I have migrancy to report, and lots of it. But first let's talk about God. Whether you believe in God - any God - or not, you cannot fail to have noticed the atrocious weather we have been having. A month's worth of rain fell in a day in some places, and it has been COLD! FFS, it's nearly May, and I'm cold. April has been colder than March, and there are a few stories circulating about how May is going to be the coldest on record. Can't wait. Anyhow, in various texts that I have not read, it is Gods that are responsible for weather. He is/they are the ones who send floods, storms, fires and general pestilence to wreak havoc upon weak and unrepentent sinners. Towards the end of March, I would suggest we did something really bad. Personally, I'm in the clear. I have been working very conscientiously, and at the end of March I was in Finland taking photos of birds, so it wasn't me. Somebody, however, has messed up in a big way. The result is the worst spring I can remember in my 275 years birding.

It is extremely fashionable to moan about how rubbish 2012 has been. You will recall, perhaps, how the very same people were in February saying what an extraordinary year 2012 had been, what with Yellowthroats safely tucked under belts, and Spanish Sparrows happily in bags. You will also perhaps that other non twitchers (like me) were waxing lyrical about what a brilliant year 2012 was, with Smew on every puddle, Goosanders by the fistfull, and gazillions of waders everywhere. Not now. No, 2012 is officially crap because some people haven't seen a Sand Martin yet.

I'm one of them. Until just yesterday, I could have said the same thing about House Martin, but happily that little gap on my patch year-list has now been filled. I had nipped up to the post office around lunchtime, and on the way back had decided to check the Basin in case any hirundines had been forced down by the celestial machinations. They had! The Basin was buzzing! Buzzing with Hirundines. It's basically impossible to get an accurate count when birds like this are zooming around all over the place, but a conservative estimate was 15 House Martins, 5 Swallows (ergo it must now be Summer, Jesus Christ), and 2 Swifts. The Swifts were the most surprising, and at the time I felt they were really early, in contrast to every other species this Spring. Checking my scrupulous records however, I discovered that Swifts had arrived in Wanstead, or at least been spotted by me in Wanstead, on exactly the same date in 2009 and 2010, and only in 2011 had they been later. Don't any of you ever complain that this blog isn't interesting.

So, two rapid patch ticks, and complemented only a short while later, when back home, by a Hobby out of the back window. This was a day earlier than last year, but was also a spot from my garden, which is clearly a bit of a Hobby mecca. It is actually - the birds breed relatively nearby, and in summer, Hobby comes only a close second to Goshawk Sparrowhawk in being the most likely raptor to be seen overhead. I hope that this bird is one of the residents returning, but it's too early to say, and I've not seen it since - mind you I've been at Canary Wharf. In some ways, this rubbish spring has some advantages, in that three tick days are a very strong possibility. I'm on 90 now, which is six behind this time last year. Of the regulars, I'm missing the afore-mentioned Sand Martin, as well as Tawny Owl, Common Sandpiper, Yellow Wagtail, Whinchat, Garden Warbler, Reed Warbler and Lesser Whitethroat. There are a few of the latter on the patch, I've just not lowered myself to twitching them yet. Perhaps tomorrow, if it stops bloody raining.

Bills bills and more bills

I have not had any nice post for ages. You know, people sending gifts of chocolates, free optical samples, that kind of thing. The only things that have landed on the mat have been in brown envelopes. Brown envelopes always signal doom. The accepted method of dealing with brown envelopes is to leave them on the kitchen counter unopened and hope they go away. They don't, they just stack up. I've let ours stack up for a couple of weeks now. The crunch came yesterday when a child presented me with an envelope fresh from their school bag. Guess what colour it was? Gah! My own children giving me bills! What have I done?! What have I forgotten to do?!

It was a bill for cello lessons. I've only just paid for three lots of school dinners for this half term, even the school is bankrupting me. I decided to get it over with, and opened the envelopes on the counter. They came to a four figure sum, and are all due now. And it's not like that's it either. The good ship Eco One needs taxing again next month, which also means it needs insuring again. That's another whopper right there I expect. Bills, bills, bills. Basically everything becomes due in either January or February, which is straight after Christmas, not a period known for frugality. But it doesn't stop there. The start of the year is also when you start planning stuff, so today I also booked a flight to Shetland, paid a deposit on a self-catering cottage on Mull, and booked a CalMac ferry ticket.  If you're going to be left with beans, you might as well do it properly.

I was just recovering from that by soothingly working out how many decades I had left on my mortgage when an email arrived. It was from the electricity company. Please read your meter, it said, as we would like to send you an enormous bill. If you don't, it went on to say, we will estimate your usage and send you an enormous bill anyway. Win.

Now before you all start sending me cheques, or small wads of used fifties, I am able to pay these bills. I would have been very foolish to have signed up to all the various things that the bills relate to if I could not, though note that this has not stopped many many people from spending wantonly and sucking this country into a large hole, along with the good financial people who encouraged their borrowing. No, it is all OK, just about, and though it pains me, we are not on the street just yet. It's just when it comes up in one lump that you actually notice quite how much normal living actually costs. We are not extravagant people (except for Mrs L's obsession with buying obscene quantities of optical equipment almost constantly), we live well within our means. My car is twenty years old, and we have not heard of flat screen TVs. Most of our kitchen cupboard doors hang on one hinge, and we have instructed our butler to only feed the tropical fish twice a week. My point is that even if you only stick to the basics, which by and large we do, the cost of living is simply ridiculous. Take my council tax for example. Monumental - over two thousand pounds!! Imagine the holiday we could go on?! Imagine the left-hand barrel of a pair of Swarovski SVs! Included within that (since about 2006, and until about 2018)is of course my personal contribution to the 2012 Olympics. The same Olympics that are two miles away and that I got no tickets for. The same Olympics that are going to build a fuck-off police megabase on Wanstead Flats mere yards from my house and prevent me birding Jubilee pond. The same Olympics that are between me and work, and where the transport bosses think that a wait of half an hour to get onto the tube at Stratford is "reasonable". Talking of which, getting to work costs me almost six quid - it's about five miles away. Eating lunch is another four or five, and don't get me started on coffee. At the Spanish Sparrow twitch a bacon roll and a cup of coffee cost me £1.50. In Canary Wharf, where my best bird this year has been a measly Blackbird, I'd be looking at a fiver. London is sickening, and I'm led to believe that there are plenty of other places that are equally as outrageous.

You know what, I am all whined out. Typing this has been very helpful, and I now know what to do. Pour myself a drink. I'll try not to think about 60% of every sip being tax.

Goodbye Freedom

It's official, I have a job. The offer came through today. Of course it's subject to references and various checks to make sure I'm not a heinous criminal, fraudster or drug dealer, or just plain nuts (here's hoping they don't find this blog), but when all of those steps are complete I am once again going to be a financial contributor to the economic welfare of this great island nation. This means that daily, from 9am to about midday, I'm going to be working for you. For us. For all of us, together. I'd like to let you know that I never claimed a penny of support during my long absence from earning money, I didn't want anyone to suffer on my behalf. I just love you all, and I can't wait to start giving again. I particularly want my taxes to go to dole claimants who ticked Greater Yellowlegs in Cornwall this week, or alternatively to help with the Sky Sports subscriptions for those who cannot afford to watch Premiership Football at home and have to go to the pub to see the games. Here, let me get those lagers...

Missed part of the bird, but I still like it.

Have I missed work? Er, no. There are very few people in this world who do. Have I missed having an income stream? Er, yes. A lot. Whilst my time at home with the kiddos has been amazing, and I would not change it for the world, having a steady dribble of cash going the wrong way has been mildly traumatic for someone not used to that. Then again, not earning money has had the immeasurable benefit of teaching me that money isn't as important as maybe I thought it was. We very easily adapted to life without large piles of fifties lying around in every room, and ceasing bathing in Champagne did wonders for my skin. You can't buy happiness someone once said. Bollocks. Give me a couple of mil and I'd have a bloody good go.

I have, though, been very weak. Very. I have courageously and bravely got myself a job at the very same institution that dispensed with my services two and a half years ago. I like a challenge, new experiences, and as such will get my old ID number back, and my old email address too. And my job will be looking at the same kind of stuff I was looking at before, indeed, I am going to carry on with one of the same projects I was doing before. It will be like I never left. Like I had a long holiday. A sabbatical of sorts.

So I need to enjoy these last few days of freedom. I need to bird like I have never birded before. I need to take photographs, and lots of them. Tomorrow Pudding starts school. When I lost my job, she was in nappies, and now she's a proper little girl with smart shoes. It has gone quickly, and I have accomplished very little. But who cares? I've deliberately done next to nothing, A bit of writing, a teensy little bit of twitching, but mainly I have just cleaned the house. Dusted.

I have no idea why I started this blog. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Six weeks later and I was unemployed, though I am (fairly) sure the events are unrelated. In one sense it gave me something to do. A way to continue to be creative, to continue using words with more than one syllable. I have to say I've enjoyed it a lot. This is usually the point when bloggers sign off and say "So long, and thanks for all the fish" or something along those lines, but I reckon I'll keep it going. Domestic woes may get replaced with lists of new and wonderfully meaningful buzzwords I have encountered, or why the tube is just the best place to be on a Monday morning, but otherwise I envisage it remaining essentially the same.

A load of old rubbish.

The Easter Holidays so far

Number of disputes: 23,872
Cumulative minutes on Naughty Step: 425
Tears (litres): 152.2
Balls lost: 8
School Runs: 0

The last statistic is by far and away the most important. No School Run = A W E S O M E. Life without the school run is just so much more pleasurable. The School Run isn't just the fifteen minutes it takes to travel to the school, it's the whole shebang. Getting up. Getting them up. Breakfast. Clearing up breakfast. Finding clothes within Mt Garment and getting dressed. Remembering EVERY OBJECT KNOWN TO MAN that will  be needed at school that day. Coats on, shoes on, bags packed. OK, are we ready? Right, out the door. Alarm set (for all burglars reading). Oh, we have collectively forgotten: string, cardboard, flashcards, instrument, PE kit, a fish costume, book, random object. *sigh*. OK, unlock door. Turn alarm off. Disarm crossbow trap (for all burglars still reading) , find string, cardboard, flashcards, instrument, PE kit, fish costume, book, other stuff. Repeat several times. Ready? Seatbelts on, off we go.

The whole process takes about two hours and is the worst part of my day by a country mile. It can be done in less time, I think my record is about 52 minutes from waking up to depositing children, but we forgot the string, cardboard....

Not needing to get to school, indeed not even needing to get up at all, is nothing short of superb. This holiday is particularly long. We have the regular two weeks plus weekends. Then there is a Bank Holiday, then an utterly gratuitous "inset day", the nightmare of working parents everywhere, so that teachers can take advantage of cheaper return flights. Then we have a ridiculous two days back at school, when I predict that about fifty percent of children will mysteriously be ill, Friday off for the Royal Wedding, another weekend, another Bank Holiday, and then school starts again - by which time it will be about August I expect.

So to say that we (I) am having a rather relaxed time at the moment is understating it somewhat. The holiday can last for three months, you won't find me complaining. I may need to referee an almost infinite number of trvial arguments between offspring, but it's still preferable to the daily School Run. The children are enjoying it too, and are taking each day at their own pace. Middle child in particular is taking full advantage of not needing to get up, and is just not getting up. The days when I could sleep for thirteen hours straight are unfortunately long gone, I am quite envious.


So let me run you through today. We all managed to get up by about 8:30, and also managed to make the mid-morning dentist appointment without being interrupted by a rare Plover. After that we made a quick trip into deepest darkest Essex so that the kids could add Woodchat Shrike to their lists (always go see Shrikes, rule #162), and were home in time for lunch. Then we watched Fantasia, with top honours going to Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, following which we made a very cool Lego spaceship, and then played with it a lot. The kids amused themselves for a bit while I made dinner - stir-fry, well received - and then it was bed time. Easy.

 
Tomorrow, the plan is that there is no plan. Can't wait!

Saeculum Obscurum

Hello Internet Acolytes, I am back. For the past five days I have been forcibly transported back in time to the Dark Ages. On Saturday afternoon, my phone died, and has remained dead until about two hours ago. I was sat on the sofa with everything crossed, praying that England would survive the last few overs of the cricket, when the phone rang. It took a while to register where the sound was coming from. I eventually traced it to a funny white thing with numbers on it in the front hall, and on picking it up my Mother's voice came out of one end. Amazing!! She was blissfully unaware that this was the first phone call I had received in a week, and carried on as if nothing was wrong. "Yes mum",  "Right mum", "Anything else mum?" "HANG UP NOW MUM!!"

The Renaissance has arrived in Wanstead. If the phone now worked, then...... I ran to the computer, switched it on, and THERE WAS LIGHT!! I threw away my chisel and stone, furled my semaphore flags, put out the fire, and got tapping.

Sweet sweet internet. Thank God. I can finally stop actually birding and instead sit in front of my computer. There is a Lesser White-fronted Goose in Norfolk that I have, from a hundred miles away, been itching to spout forth on. An Eastern Yellow Wagtail thread on Birdforum was looking like heading south very quickly, and I had perhaps missed the terminal slide. Gah! And my blog, this blog, what of my Fatbirder ranking?! It was all too much to bear.

The story goes thusly. On Saturday, some pretend workmen set up on the main road near my house, and pretended to do some work. Nobody batted an eyelid. Frankly if there were no cones or piles of rubble nearby, that's when we would start thinking things were amiss. The work they were pretending to do involved 1600 very thin strands of copper, all bundled into an immense cable 160 metres long. Copper is apparently quite expensive these days. If you need some, it is far cheaper to nick it, and two of those strands were mine....

'Snip'

In an instant, my life fell apart. A phone I can live without, what son ever phones their mother anyway? But broadband, whoa there! That's entirely different. A disaster. I was just perusing a popular birding site, clicked to the next page, and....nothing. Nothing at all. I pulled all the wires out and tried again. Nothing. Imagining what a help-desk would advise, I turned the computer off, and then on again. Still nothing. Eventually I made it to the white phone in the front hall. Ah-hah! I made an appointment with BT using my mobile phone. A lady in India said an engineer would visit in five days time. Five minutes did you say? What an excellent service, see you soon! No, five days. Oh, five hours, oh very well then. I'll um, watch some TV. Oh, I can't. Er, I'll, err, hmmm. Sorry, did you say five DAYS?! "Yes sir." Is the engineer coming from India?

Somehow I made it through Sunday, and on Monday morning on the school run noticed a large number of BT vans parked on the verge on the main road. They had a digger, lots of cables, and finally a little red and white tent over a hole in the ground, in which a cold and miserable-looking man was sat surrounded by 1600 little wires in a huge tangle....

Well, they weren't kidding, it has taken five days. I called up to cancel the engineer, but it was too late, his flight had already landed. I had about eighty emails, and was disappointed to see that the Eastern Yellow Wagtail thread had returned to being about an Eastern Yellow Wagtail. How boring.

So, has not having an internet connection been refreshing? Has it been a test of character? How have I coped? I was surprised how much I missed it. If somebody had said to me that I'd be without a functioning computer for a week, I'd have shrugged it off. Ah well, I'll do something else then, I would have said. The reality is much more illuminating. It is amazing how much we rely on the internet. And this is not just me wasting hours reading bird blogs and so on. I have wanted to look at weather maps, I have wanted to look at travel updates, I have wanted to do some Christmas shopping, I have wanted to see if I have any money, I've wanted to get in touch with my Aussie friends to crow.... It hasn't helped that it is December, with no daylight and crappy weather. In May it would have been a lot easier. We've been out quite a bit, but the children prefer to be indoors and warm, and anyway, I can't see birds in the dark.

So have I been productive? Have I done all those jobs for Mrs L that I've been putting off. No, of course not! I've just been moping about the place, trying the phone every hour on the hour. Having no internet has been terrible. After no blog updates for five days, one of my mates thought I'd gone and got a job, that's how bad it's been. I defy anyone reading this to not miss the internet, though the fact that you're reading this suggests that perhaps I have a more prone demographic....

Anyway, enough moaning about my bourgeois problems, I've got stuff to do. I'll be back later to talk about birds, as not having a computer means I've actually seen some real ones.

Hurting Myself

My toe you know about. It is mostly better, though about half-way through the healing process I stubbed it again on a chair and went back to square one. I don't expect I mentioned it though, I am not the complaining type.

Well, I've done it again. Not my toe, this time both knees. I am hobbling severely. About three weeks ago, or whenever it was that I was dipping the Bluethroat at Rainham, I tripped and smacked my right knee on the edge of the board-walk. Ouch. I could walk fine, but when I stretched the knee a certain way, by golly it hurt. Today, three weeks later, it's still hurting, the action which most aggravates it is picking things up off the floor. Lucky therefore that I don't have to spend my entire day picking up after children. I get a sharp, shooting pain, and if I poke the affected area it really hurts. I don't do that very often obviously, just every now and again to see if it still hurts. Which it does, a lot. I wonder what I have done such that three weeks on it is still so noticeable?

Anyhow, not content with continuing sharp pain from the right knee, yesterday I did the other one. En route from the conservatory to the bottom of the garden, there to dispose of some rapidly decomposing pumpkins, I walked straight into the edge of the door. Bang. Agony. By the school run I had a slight limp, and by the evening, a proper hobble. Getting up the stairs, in and out of the car, and particularly tying my shoe-laces are all a right royal pain. In the knee.

This morning, I've done something to the end of my middle finger, on my left hand since you ask. I was cleaning out the powder tray on the washing machine, slipped, and well, I've done something to it. I don't know what. No swelling, no bruise, just yet another area of me that now hurts.



I am clearly falling to pieces, and I want to know why. Please don't tell me that this is the ageing process. I'm 35 for God's sake, does it really start so soon? I'm noticing two things. The first is that I am definitely less spritely than I was before. My carefree bounding lollops go wrong, as per the toe, and my prior nimbleness that allowed me to safely negotiate tricky areas like doorways is letting me down. Are these signs of deteriorating coordination? Or is it just, er, the increased effects of gravity, which I hear has been getting stronger lately?

Secondly, when I do smack into something, the results seem a lot worse. I'd like to think that a few years ago when I bashed into a sharp corner, well it would hurt, but that I'd shake it off pretty quickly and get on with it. And certainly not blog about it ad infinitum. But I can't help noticing that these minor injuries are dragging, are taking much longer to disappear. Of course I am manly and tough, and just get on with it, no whining here, move on, but secretly it is beginning to niggle. What if I need to run for a patch tick? Would I make it? Time will no doubt tell.