All work and no play makes Jonathan a dull boy

Egad, this working life is tough! I've been outside for about 0.2s seconds today and during that time I heard a Ring-necked Parakeet but didn't see it. OK, so I've actually been outside for a bit more than that as I had to do three school runs, but my point is that working and birding do not mix particularly well. Unless you're a bird guide of course, then the two would go together extremely well. Unfortunately I'm not a bird guide. I'm an office drone. Mind you at least I got to work from home. Most people don't even get that, and instead are cloistered in an air-conditioned cubicle for hours at a stretch.

Productivity at home today was quite remarkable. If you didn't think I had the will-power, think again! I very dutifully worked out some very boring things and told some people about them. The people then wrote back about them. One of them even called me, that was quite exciting. When I'd finished looking at this particular thing, I looked at another thing. Welcome to my new life.

A propos of nothing at all. I didn't even see one of these today.

Meanwhile, for I keep an eye on these things, the east coast got plastered with rarities. Red-flanked Bluetails everywhere with Great Grey Shrikes hunting them, Yellow-browed Warblers all over the shop, and even an Isabelline Wheatear roughly where the Woodchat Shrike was at the weekend. Had I not been otherwise engaged, I may have gone. Rats, as they say. I am not used to this, but no doubt the realisation will sink in with time.

Anyway, as you have probably gathered, I have nothing to say as I have done nothing. Whilst this does not usually hold me back, today I just can't spout forth. Blogger's block? No idea, it may be that my creative senses have been dulled by excel spreadsheets and the heady world of regulatory capital. Just a thought.

But fear not, for the weekend is close at hand. One more day of working to get through, and then two precious days are mine. All mine. Oh, apart from Saturday, when I'm busy with stuff. Children, that kind of thing. So Sunday then. Question is do I hit the patch, or do I go further afield? Only time will tell.

Not enough hours in the day

Imagine for a moment that I have a wick coming out of the top of my head. I am a candle, and I am alight. My hair is gently being singed, my scalp getting hotter. There is also a wick coming out of my left foot. That too is alight, and causing some discomfort. I am a candle burning at both ends. Put without stupid references to candles, there is not enough time in the day. Last night I went to bed at 1am, the night before that, also 1am. With paid employment now taking up the vast majority of my normal waking hours, all the stuff that I used to do during the day while the kids were at school is getting pushed to either end, and I’m still not getting it all done.

This is exactly how I remember it before, but then that was without the comparative luxury of knowing that one didn’t have to live in complete chaos. Back then, living in a bombsite seemed normal. When I lost my job in 2009, I turned my not inconsiderable energy and drive to running the house and looking after the kids, with possibly a small amount of local birding thrown in. Now that I am back at work, I see everything I strived to sort out disintegrating, and disintegrating fast. This is naturally extremely irritating. My response has been to attempt to squeeze some of what I used to do during the day into the mornings and evenings.

Last night for instance I did a pile of cleaning in the kitchen, and this morning saw me hanging up washing, cleaning up the kitchen – again, moving the vacuum cleaner whose upturned plug I had trodden on several times in the last few days, and helping the kids with the arduous task of putting away socks. It didn’t help that I got up late, but that was because I had only gone to bed a matter of hours previously after all the stuff I had needed to do last night. And this is with help!! At the moment, I am not responsible for either the school run or feeding anyone. That thankless task is being done by a succession of exhausted relatives, without whom we would be up a certain creek missing a certain paddle, and we are very grateful.

Tomorrow, I’m in charge again. I’ve had over a week in the office now, sorting myself out and working out what exactly it is that I need to do, but with that bedding-in out of the way, I’m going to attempt to work from home. I won’t have time during the day to do much of what I used to, but I think that just by being present when the children are around I can perhaps keep a lid on quite how much devastation they can cause. Or that is the plan anyway. In reality I’m going to be hiding myself away and hoping that they don’t kill each other.

We always knew that this period would be difficult, and of course it didn’t help that I went to both Shetland and Norfolk in quick succession, but that’s October for you, and I'm already planning next year. We’re both working full-time, we have three kids at school, including one on a daft half-day schedule (which thankfully comes to an end quite soon), and the house does not clean itself, nor the clothes wash themselves. Neither does food cook itself, nor transport itself from the shop to our kitchen. And more is the pity, for soon something will have to give. I’m thinking specifically of the word “cleaner” at this point. Though it pains me to pay someone else to clean my house, it may have to happen. It would be one less thing to worry about, and would of course help the economy. The Lithuanian economy primarily.

Then there is the small matter of local birding, the thing that above all keeps me sane and balanced. Can you guess how much I’ve done in the last two weeks? Exactly. Right now, I’d need help finding my way to Wanstead Flats.  I’ve not been out once. Not that there has been much to see, the odd Ring Ouzel, a few Skylarks and a large Sparrowhawk ;-) , but that’s not the point. I just enjoy being out there, and that has been sacrificed. I’m not happy about it, but there is nothing I can do at the moment. The good times are over it seems.....

Unless.....have a Shrike! They always cheer me up, and they may cheer you up too having just read my big whinge. This juvenile Woodchat Shrike at Lowestoft in Suffolk was extremely approachable, though with many other birders there, and a recent article in Birdwatch Mag about photographers, I didn't want to push my luck. We popped in to pay it homage on the way back from birdless Norfolk last weekend, and it cheered us up no end, as did a Glossy Ibis just down the road at Minsmere, site of some of my finest smash and grab raids. And I finally connected with the Semipalmated Sandpiper in Essex as well, although my mate Lee, er I mean Bradders, thinks we're stringing it as he didn't see it earlier in the afternoon. I of course would never doubt any of my mates' sightings..... no no no, never.

Seeing no birds in Norfolk

A few of us had booked a birdy long weekend in Norfolk about six months ago. At peak time, we would surely be knee-deep in rarities, fighting Yellow-browed Warblers off with our bare hand, shooing Olive-backed Pipits off the pavements. The westerly winds had other ideas however, and as our long-awaited trip dawned, so too did the realisation that we were going to see almost nothing. Naturally, we turned to drink.

We had left on Thursday morning, and taken a circuitous route that involved dipping the Semipalmated Sandpiper at East Tilbury, spending eleven hours in the Hornchurch/Romford area picking the Monkey up, ticking the Sandhill Crane for the England list I don't keep, and finally arriving in West Norfolk late afternoon. Rather than go out birding, we made for the nearest pub.

Whereas my trip to Shetland was characterised by 8pm being thought of as a late night, this trip to Norfolk was the birding equivalent of Ibiza (though without any Mediterranean species). Wherry on draft and a rack of ribs, does it come any better? The boozing continued back at the accomodation, and about twenty minutes after we all went to bed, Dave Mo got up and started his morning routine with a shower. This was to become a feature of the holiday.

The following day, suitably refreshed after fifteen million gallons of beer and about an hour's sleep, we indecisively made our way to Hunstanton. There we saw no birds over the course of about half an hour, and then gave up and went to a cafe for breakfast. After more indecisiveness and ever-increasing numbers of Gadwall being released, we set upon a new plan which took us to Cley. Guess what? We saw no birds. Well, we saw a handful of Great Skuas and some Goldies, but the Richard's Pipits and Red-flanked Bluetails were sadly lacking. We couldn't even find the Lapland Buntings that had been reported from the Eye Field. This was not for want of trying though. I spent about an hour scanning and scanning, and in the process was nearly forced to kill about twenty other birders.

Perhaps this is unique to the type of birding gentry found only in Norfolk, or perhaps this is a sign of national malaise, but not a single other birder could be bothered to actually look for the Laps. This didn't stop all twenty of them coming up to Hawky and I, setting up their scopes, and then asking if we had them. When we answered no, they looked through their scopes for approximately eight seconds each, and then picked them up and walked off back to the beach, their car, their deckchair, whatever. To begin with I was fairly cheerful about it. Nope, hadn't seen them, but it was a big field and they were small birds. Then I started saying that only by looking could you hope to find. Then I became a little short, and asked them how many birders they could actually see looking for them. When this didn't faze them at all, and they walked off exactly as all the others had done before them, I snapped, and was possibly then overtly rude to the next lot that turned up and called them a bunch of of lazy goodfornothing wankers and that I was not there just to ensure that they could view a Lapland Bunting through my scope and that they could just piss off. At that point we too decided to leave, which was fortunate, as the next sixty-something well-kitted-out birding incompetent who had asked me if I had the Lapland Buntings for him would likely have been twatted with my extremely substantial tripod, and then battered to death whilst on the floor with the blunt end of my SLR.

Next stop Wells Wood, where we all wandered around disconsolently for ages, and on the point of leaving were extremely fortunate that my Shetland-trained ears picked out the Yellow-browed Warbler which then proceeded to utterly elude us, bar more brief calls, for a further hour. I forget what we did next, but it almost certainly didn't involved birds and almost certainly did involve beer in dramatic quantites whilst we waited for Dave Mo to get up and for the next day to start.

The next day was pretty fun it has to be said. We left the Mo and the Monkey watching some rugby game or other, and Shaun, Hawky, Redsy and me went off to Twitchwell to photograph waders. This we achieved, though at the cost of getting rather wet, particularly Shaun. It's all about fieldcraft. Position yourself correctly, don't move (unless a wave threatens to drown you), be patient, and the birds will come to you. This culminated in me being surrounded by Knot, Barwit and Turnstone literally feet away, it was superb. I rattled off some 850 frames in the two hours I was there, some of which you are privileged to see littering this post. Kind of. After some comedy antics from the orienteering team of Monkey and Mo, who tried to access Titchwell via Thornham saltmarsh, we attempted a Seawatch at Sheringham, saw nothing, and went home for - wait for it - some beers.

And that was it really. Norfolk in three days netted one Yellow-browed Warbler and a few Skuas. We decided we would cut our losses and so we all went home and back to work. Yes, even me. Happily we went via Suffolk, which actually had some birds. And you can see some of those... in the next program post.

PS  If you didn't read the last sentence in a David Attenborough voice you will have entirely missed out on what I was trying to achieve. Natch.

When Technology Fails

Largely, I like the gadgets that living in the year 2011 means exist for my convenience and entertainment. For instance, I like having my entire music collection on a very small piece of electronic wizardry. I enjoy the fact that my camera can take ten frames a second, and continue to do so for ages. I also enjoy not having to change the film after 36 shots, and instead being able to take over 1000 images without even thinking about it. I like the instant gratification that having a small screen on the back allows. And histograms, well, where do I start? There is no praise high enough. I like having all the calls and songs of hundreds of European birds on my phone as an instant reference, and I like being able to call friends and family from just about anywhere with the same device, especially when it is to report the bagging of Sandhill Cranes in Aberdeenshire when they are all miles away. As far as I am concernced, these are excellent uses of technology, and they suit my needs very well.

Sometimes however technology oversteps the mark. This happened today, and predictably the device in question was a satnav. Now satnavs have their uses, don’t get me wrong, many is the time that mine has got me to an unfamiliar location, there to see some rare bird or other. I daresay that on occasion not having had a satnav might have caused me to miss a bird whilst I faffed about working out where I needed to go. Today though I could have lived without a satnav. When you are driving down a road in the Norfolk countryside, and the satnav comes out with “continue 400 yards , then board ferry”, you have to wonder if technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to to be.

A ferry?!  The four of us in the car looked at each other and wondered if we had heard it right. We had, for about a minute later the road ended abruptly at a river, and there, clanking towards us from the other side, was a small chain ferry. WTF? The lady in the satnav had announced the ferry-boarding with absolutely no change in intonation, it had all been very factual. “Proceed down the road, board the ferry”. I might have forgiven it had she been marginally excited. “Guys, carry on for just a bit longer, and then there’s a surprise!”  But no, monotone. Actually it was quite exciting. Until we saw the sign that said a car and passengers would be charged £3.90 for the 45 second crossing. For the distance travelled, that made it more expensive than the Scillonian, which is saying something. At least there wasn’t a long wait, but it would have been nice to have been asked. More human to have been asked.

The old codger operating the ferry did not fail to notice the evident surprise on our faces. Didn’t mean to come ‘ere did ya?,  he said. No, we admitted. Satnav, he pronounced, with an air of certainty. Yes, we said. That’ll be £3.90, he said.

Statistical Collective Boredom

I was recently shown the "Stats" feature of blogger, which, semi-luddite that I am, I had not realised existed. Way back in the distant past I had managed to enable something called "Statcounter", but, these things being what they are, it required a password, which, naturally, I forgot. Since then the only pointers I have had as to blog-popularity are the Fatbirder counter thingy that you see down the bottom, a pageview counter that I cannot remember ever putting on and thus distrust, and the how many comments get left. And given that half the time I can't even leave comments on my own blog, let alone anyone else, I've been largely igoring that guide, and worked solely off the Fatbirder thing. This usually sits at around 150, but peaked once at 88. How that gets worked out I have no idea, as it moves across a fairly wide range with surprising regularity. Right now I'm sitting between a Russian language site that might be about birds, and some kind of photographic encyclopaedia that quacks at you when you open the Ducks page, but this varies.

Now I have discovered blogger stats, and my what a load of fun they are! They tell me, for instance, and this is what has prompted this short post, that yesterday saw a staggering 1044 pageviews. And only about 800 of those were me checking to see if anyone left any comments.... Seriously, 1000 pageviews? Vous etes having a laugh, non? Checking to see if this was some horrible mistake, a thought which presumably went through the minds of roughly 1000 people at some point yesterday, I went back a bit further, and discovered that the day before saw 675, the day before that 825, and the day before that 748. I'm no statistician, but that would seem to indicate that it's not just a fluke. I checked to see if I had inadvertently written about Great Tits on any of the days, for we all know what the internet is primarily used for, but of these there was no mention. Clearly I am on a roll - shame I just started work again...

I think yesterday's sortie into four figures for the first time ever can be explained away by it being Monday, combined with the world being once again close to economic collapse, and having just had three Party Conferences in a row. People are bored. Very bored. Cameron this, Osbourne that. Please, anything but politics! How about a so-called bird blog that hasn't mentioned birds for three days? Yes internet, take me there now! Hallelujah! Oh, wait......

Sadly the stats page does not show the length of each visit, or at least not that I have found, and that of course may paint a different picture, and tell me that cumulatively the 1044 pageviews lasted about 32 seconds. We shall never know, and seeing as it may burst my proverbial bubble, I'm happy to remain in the dark. More interesting is that it tells you which pages have been visited the most. No matter what time period I look at, the top page is "Birding in New Delhi", which dates from May 2009, generally by a factor of ten over any other page. The next most popular is my map of Wanstead Flats, which is probably just people wanting directions to Long Wood. Nothing else even comes close. These two facts are very surprising, but it shows that there may be some mileage in writing about popular birding destinations like Wanstead Flats. And New Delhi.

Far and away the best bit of stats is of course the keyword searches that brought people here. "Hoopoe Bird" is quite a common one - I particularly like how specific people are being. Hoopoe Cow, for example, is never seen. "Birderdes" is another one that crops up fairly frequently. Perhaps there is a birder called Des somewhere, or perhaps, in the same way that I type Wheater instead of Wheatear around 96% of the time, it's just a cock up. This week more than one person searched for "boy otter costume", which is probably entirely innocent, and today someone searched for "ryanair monopod", no doubt wanting to know how a monopod might best be used to beat a hand-luggage-measuring Ryanair employee senseless next time around. Sadly the keyword search is capped at ten per time period, so some of the more obscure and highly perverted ones that are perhaps out there will have to remain a mystery, but the possibility of scoring a few now down the line now that I have discovered a way to view them may prompt me to insert some ambigious phrases in future posts. Not that I am that immature of course.....

Bird's bum wiggling in the air.

So how was it for me?

Monday morning commute. Other people's BO at 8am. Heat. Noise. All delights I was thrilled to become reacquainted with, and pay for the privilege. I quickly decided I hadn't missed them at all. Forty-five minutes later the system spat me out at Canary Wharf, my home from 1998 to 2009. I approached the familiar building with a spring in my step, no nervousness this time around. First up an HR induction, entirely predictable, entirely unnecessary. Was this my first time working there? Er, no. In fact I was working here while you were still doing your GCSEs. I didn't say this of course, but dutifully signed 12,235 forms in triplicate, promised not to send emails inciting racial hatred, and gave them my National Insurance number so that I could start funding bankrupt-Britain again.

All signed up, I progressed to security. There I queued, at vast expense, for forty-five minutes while a succession of dopey employees explained to the single man on duty on a Monday morning that they had lost their security passes over the weekend. Finally my turn, I was photographed, and a new shiny pass with the new me on it was issued. Through the turnstiles and into the lift.

I was back.

How strange it felt. People looked at me curiously, wondering if it really was (a thinner version of) me. Others, certain of my identity, came up immediately. I had the same conversation about a million times over the course of the day. What, you mean you've been doing nothing? Well, if you discount the childcare, the school runs, the shopping, the cleaning and general shite that comes with running a house, well yes, I've been doing nothing, just twiddling my thumbs really.

At my new desk, logged in, I looked myself up in the internal directory. There I was! But I was the old me again, the photo circa 2004. Big hair. More chins. And my old phone number too, and my old secretary. These I changed, but my email remains the same. I'm definitely back. I called a few people, just to see what would happen. Bloody Hell! What are you doing back here?! What have you been doing? Oh, nothing....

A short while later and I decided to tour my old floor. Same old same old, familiar faces, familiar voices. A real buzz - a trading floor - lots going on. More conversations, more envy. I tried the coffee machine. Cappucino awful, the espresso later was much better, though needed less sugar. Or more coffee. I had my old lunch. Not literally of course, but the same thing I used to eat more or less every day after wandering around the whole restaurant being unenthused by anything else. The BBQ sauce remains excellent, the salad dressing sub-standard and gloopy. Truly nothing has changed.

I've been out of the game, doing nothing, for over two and half years. I always said I would go back to work when Pudding started school, which was two weeks ago. Mrs L doubted my resolve, but I've done it. I hadn't meant go back to exactly the same place, but it was convenient. I'm very much a known quantity. They're prepared to let me transition back around my parental responsibilities, which is fantastic. I don't want to let go of that, I truly enjoy it. I'm part of my kids childhood, a real presence, rather than the dad they never see. It's important. Three years ago I failed to see that importance, it took getting made redundant and having it forced upon me to hammer it home. I was blind, but I soon saw. Money, useful but unimportant. Kids, wife (boss), family, home. That's what it's all about. Oh, and birds.

NB The views and opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own and are not those of my employer, who are a fine, upstanding company, with moral standards far, far higher than my own.

Economics, by me

On the cusp of returning to the salt mines, it occured to me that we're all utterly screwed no matter what we do. No, really. I was wondering what happened to all the money that we don't have any more. I reasoned that money doesn't just disappear, so that must mean that someone else must have it. It isn't me. Nor is it anyone I know. A few Russian oligarchs have a shit-load of it, and China presumably has heaps in return for all the plastic shite we collectively buy, but surely that can't account for all of it.

The UK's national debt is currently £940 billion. We have bought almost £1,000 billion of crap from China. If you include the cost of all the bank bailouts, the debt number is £2,266 billion. That is two trillion quid. Maybe - I've never really understood trillions. Anyway, a staggeringly large amount. Money that we don't have, and therefore have to borrow from other people. It costs yet more billions in interest payments. There are three ways the country can get money. The first is taxes. I start paying them again tomorrow - don't say I never help. The second is by selling stuff, such as our entire national infrastructure. This was called privatisation, and we have nothing left to sell anymore. The third is the easiest, whereby we just print more money, and then say "Golly, look at that, where did that come from? Very handy." This is called quantative easing and is generally accepted as a bad thing as it devalues all the other money that we don't have.

So, add up those three things, and that's what we get coming in. Call it a salary if you will. But then come the outgoings. For you and me, it's food, the mortgage, binoculars, that kind of thing. For the country it's stuff like building hospitals and paying nurses to work in them, paying interest on our national debt, and ensuring that thousands of utter layabouts can continue to smoke, swill lager, and watch Sky TV with their benefit cheques.

And that's the problem. The cost of doing all of that far exceeds our salary, and has done for years. If you and I were to do this, we'd be out on the street living in cardboard boxes in shop doorways. For countries, you just call it a budget defecit, blame it on the previous governent, and sell some more gilts to fund it. The actual number this year is forecast to be about £170 billion. That number simply gets added to the £940 billion of money we don't have.

But worry ye not, there is a plan. It is called the goverment's economic strategy, or to use another well-used term, austerity measures. These measures are designed to save £81 billion over the next four years, but of course come at the expense of having policemen on our streets, or even police stations. Oh, and we're all going to have to continue working until we DIE, but on the plus side we are still going to have nice new shiny Aircraft Carrier.

It's a huge amount of money, and is going to be painful for a generation, perhaps longer (see below) But here's the rub. Even if the country does manage to save that £81 billion, some simple maths indicates that we're still screwed. Assuming the budget defecit stays stable at £170 billion a year for the next four years, rather than increase the national debt by £680 billion, we're dramatically slashing that number to only a £599 billion increase. What is the bloody use in that? To even shave £1 billion off the national debt, we need to save £171 billion a year! And even then it will take the best part of a millenium to even get back to zero! To get back to zero in a useful timeframe doesn't even bear thinking about. We're screwed. Utterly screwed. And we're in good shape! Look at Greece. Look at Ireland. Look at Spain, look at America. The western economic model, that of spending money you don't have (and will never have), is well and truly broken. The austerity measures are pie in the sky. What is the bloody point? We're doomed.

It's amazing what you can think of during a short car journey isn't it? All of the above came to me on the M11 between Cambridge and London this afternoon. I've never had any interest in economics whatsoever, apart from on a personal level. But the real worry is what actually is money? Is it a number I see online when I check my bank balance? Or is that ethereal? Is it the the bits of paper I have from time to time in my wallet that promise to pay the bearer on demand? Yeah, with what exactly? All the gold reserves we already sold? The UK ran out of "money", whatever that is, years ago. The situation is only getting worse, and the austerity measures only mean it's getting worse fractionally more slowly.

So the answer is........?

No idea. Just enjoy your birding before you have to sell your binoculars.