Must. Write. Something.

Nothing to say. This evening I've started about eight blog posts, and never got more than about two sentences. There was one on commuting, There was one on long, dark evenings. There was one on tax. I've forgotten what the others were about, but they all had one thing in common. Boring. And thus were abandoned. This one has that in common too, but the difference is that I've persevered with it. Probably wasn't worth it. The trouble is the age-old one, which is that I have done nothing interesting recently. Neither, I suspect, have many other people, but they perhaps don't like writing as much as I do. I refuse to go watch TV, and I had dinner already. What else is there to do? Plenty of useful things, but they're all domestic. And boring.

In case you hadn't guessed it, I'm bored. Bored of commuting. Bored of winter. Interested in tax, obviously, but only one aspect, which is paying less of it. Unfortunately I don't have that choice and the number is what the number is. At least it's done and I'm not going to get fined. Of birdy things to say, there are none. I popped out very briefly at the weekend, and not since. It has been wet, miserable, and dark, and I would like it to be dry, warm, and light. I sense that it is getting lighter, slowly but surely, but even though Wheatears are potentially only five weeks away, there is still a long way to go.

If you detected a slight pause just then, it is because I stopped and very nearly deleted this entire post. Bet you wish I had. Oh, and before I forget, and because ideally every post should have a photo, there was a minor silver lining on Tuesday, when my commute took over two hours. Having attempted the tube to no avail, I then tried a bus closer to home. None of them stopped as they were all full before they got to me, but on the trudge home I passed a Parakeet. It looked pretty settled, so I grabbed a camera and came back, pleased to find it still there. And then I tried the mainline station, where I spent a happy 45 minutes on the platform and failed to get onto four trains. Then I walked to work.

Sycophantism is alive and well

Chateau L recently tried internet grocery shopping for the first time. No I haven't seen any birds. Shut up. Mainly we did this because we would get £15 off our first order, and that's enough to keep the children in bagels for a week, as well as meaning we didn't have to go and brave the scrums. Win win, you would think. Except that when we did it, we didn't get £15 off. Outraged of Wanstead (Mrs) wrote in....

She received possibly the most ingratiating reply I think I have ever seen, and having nothing else to say, I have taken the path of least resistance. Here it is. It is, as I am sure you will agree, wondrous in it's sycophantism and general obsequiousness. 

Dear Mr Lethbridge,
Thank you for your email and your patience in allowing me time to investigate this issue for you.
I’m very sorry to hear of the issue you have experienced on your recent grocery order, I understand when making an amendment to your grocery order the £15.00 off a £60.00 order is no longer showing.
Having looked into this, I have unfortunately been unable to find any reason why your eCoupon is no longer showing and I apologise I’m unable to offer a resolution as to why the voucher has dropped off your order.
However, I will certainly look to escalate this to our Support Team for you and prevent this issue from reoccurring.
As I would not like you to miss out on this promotion, I would be happy to honour this promotion for you. With this in mind, please reply to my email once you have received your grocery order and I will be more than happy to arrange a £15.00 refund for you on this order.
Finally, thank you for bringing this to my attention, giving me the chance to look into this for you. If you have any further queries please don't hesitate to contact us.
Kind regards,

Grocery Customer Service

First of all note the excellent start as customer service addresses my wife. Then thanks for writing, and straight into a nice cringing apology for taking so long to reply (approximately six whole hours). The email suggests that a period of bargaining may have taken place, whereby we came to agreement after prolonged bartering of how long we would give them to respond, but fun though that undoubtedly would have been, it actually that didn't happen so the apology is perhaps overkill. Naturally they are very sorry. Devastated on our behalf I expect, and well over half of the six hour response time has in fact been spent weeping every time they think of our predicament. Then the actual answer. Dunno, internet innit. Sorry. Again. 

Then another period of protracted weeping, followed by the realisation that we need not miss out on this life changing eCoupon at all. Hurrah! I, I Grocery Customer Service Person, intend to honour this eCoupon! My word is my bond! Veritas vos liberabit! More weeping, though tinged with the happy knowledge that they are doing The Right Thing. They will be more than happy to. Frankly this is a let down. More than happy implies what? Thrilled? Ecstatic? Over the moon?! Anyone of these could have improved the letter hugely, an opportunity missed.

More thanking for being so cheap as to demand our fifteen quid, and then even more thanking for the opportunity to investigate it (which as we know, was a complete and utter failure). Mrs L and I actually began weeping at this point, thinking of this kind soul for whom happiness is so easily achieved. The offer of sending more queries to see if we can elicit a similarly unctuous response is one we're considering. The winter evenings are long.

What we are both dying to know is whether this is actually in the training manual. Online Customer Service people are not generally allowed expression of thought, or free will of any kind. So is this response genuinely how large supermarkets think customers like to be addressed? I doubt it, most people, including us, squirm when reading it. It's so fawning as to be uncomfortable. Imagine having to write it?! I'd quit.

Or perhaps, and this is the explanation I prefer, the bored-witless customer service team run weekly competitions to see who can come up with the most appallingly cringe-worthy response to a customer complaint. This came in at "highly commended", but fell short of a podium place due to the lack of genuine feeling implied by merely being happy, rather than completely euphoric.

Slow start

2014 marks my slowest ever start to a year list or a patch list. I've got some truly wonderful stats that I am absolutely dying to trot out, but being the kind of guy I am I've decided to hold off sharing them with you. Sparing isn't sharing. Oh, OK then, just one. Are you sitting down? In summary, since I've started keeping records, eight years or so, I've seen more birds in the first week of January (often in the first two days of January!)  than I have so far this year. Are you staggered? Are you amazed? 

But more importantly, can you tell how bothered I am? Congratulations if you chose "not in the slightest". I don't know what it is, perhaps I'm finally growing up? I'm certainly not losing the desire to see birds - I went out today, admittedly for a very short time, and it was fabulous and I enjoyed every minute of it, especially when I finally caught up with Bullfinch on the patch for the first time in two years. It's just that the desire to continually chalk up species seems to be drifting away. Obviously I was a bit a tick-machine last year, but actually I saw relatively few species versus prior years - my year lists have on a downward trend since 2009.

This doesn't mean that I've lost the urge on the twitching front though. I got in our larger car the other day for the first time this year (I use the small eco-version for the school run) and was immediately struck by a desire to drive hundreds of miles. Curious, no? The minute I sat behind the wheel I was struck by memories of fabulous birds in 2013, as most of the journeys were done in that car. Had I had the time, it's entirely possible that I might have jumped on the M1 and driven to Inverness. Luckily I didn't, but I confess I'm looking forward to the first one that isn't a Coot.

Today I contented myself with a whirlwind tour of Wanstead Park. I started off attempting to photograph Shoveler - a bit of a challenge I've set myself this year - but got nowhere and so jacked it in. Heading off to the Old Sewage Works instead, I immediately found a Grey Wagtail on the Roding, and then as mentioned found a pair of Bullfinches. The place was alive with birds - three each of Green Woodpecker and Jay, Lesser Redpolls, Greenfinch, Chaffinch and Goldfinch all over the place. And the Dunnocks, good grief! After failing to find one on the first of January, today I notched up approximately 30,000 of them, all singing their heads off. I know I'm tempting fate, but it felt a bit like spring.... Now where's that Polar Vortex?

Issues

Today it took me until the early evening to realise that my pants were on backwards. For american readers, I am not talking about my trousers. I had wondered for a while if there wasn't a bit of a problem, a little tightness, a lingering suspicion that something was amiss, but wall-to-wall meetings meant I wasn't able to pin it down. Only at half five did I manage to stagger to the bathroom to check, and sure enough.... This sums up my day really.

Anyway, in addition to apparently being too incompetent to dress myself properly, my only other news is that I managed to get out on the patch briefly at the weekend - yes, I know that is ancient history, but as you can see from the above there is not a lot else going on. I met Tony in the SSSI also failing to find Snipe, and together we zipped around both the Flats and the Park adding rare species to our year lists with consummate ease. We didn't even need to get to the shore of the Alex to find Teal, a Cormorant flew over Wanstead Park Avenue as we were walking down it, and a Grey Heron came across the allotments at the same time we did. Such skill. 

Ending up in Bush Wood, we attempted to find Firecrest and Coal Tit, and failed miserably. I guess with all the megas earlier in the day, the Birding Gods had decided Tony was all done. But not me! Back at home recuperating with a nice little coffee in the conservatory, the house silent and peaceful, I noted a small bird with what looked like a stripey head zip up the garden. Bingo! I've seen Coal Tit in my garden precisely once before, and so the timing of this bird was impeccable. It turned out there were actually two, as whilst attempting to gather photographic evidence with which to grip off TB, I unwittingly recorded a second bird that I only noticed later on the computer. I am so good at birding.

I've also just about finished going through the stuff from Morocco, and so my trip page is now complete with a few individual pages related to bird species, and a vague (very vague) stab at a report that in reality is just me babbling on about camera shit again. You had better get used to it as I am going back again soon. For now though I have just one final picture to bring you.....

Gulls, Shingle, and Camo

The rot has started. Dungeness. With the Gull Brothers. Both in camo. Oh dear. You don't believe me? Get a load of this. Richard we know about, but Mick? Yup. Some nonsense about forgetting his actual coat. As if.....

Mostly crappy light, a lot of wind, dodgy attire and a shit load of seagulls. Big ones and small ones. I admit to papping a few of them between camo-induced laughing fits. The pattern is called "Woodland Shingle". Can you see him? I can't.

Here are some of my better attempts. It's so hard, and my hit rate continues to be pitifully low, though when I do connect properly it does kind of work. The gulls didn't really play ball, and rather than a lot of nice banking and so on, they mostly flew straight past, sniggering quietly to themselves when they saw Mick. Still, makes a nice change from sitting at my desk or lying in bed with the runs. Well, at least from the former. Kittiwakes are not birds I see often, and they're in their element in the wind and the spray. First winters are absolutely lovely (for a Gull), and it was a bit of a treat to have so many birds close in. 

In addition to the Kitts, there were quite a few big Gulls around as well. For good measure, and while I'm on a roll, here's one of them too. This is the nominate race of Seagullus maximus. All four images are actually of the same bird, but depending on how the light was falling it could end up looking quite different from one photo to the next.

How to get back into birding?

I'm having a bit of trouble birding. As in I can't seem to manage it. I've been back from Morocco for about ten days, and have seen two additional species. One of those was by accident! Apparently to do birding, you have to raise binoculars to your face and look through them. Trust me when I say that's actually a lot harder than it sounds. 

I have, however, seen a Chaffinch, which was not entirely by accident. I deliberately stopped at a location known for Chaffinches up near the Basin, and lo and behold there was one. I can't say I enjoyed it particularly, but there you go. Seeing as I appear to have lost my patch mojo, I was wondering about forcing myself to look at birds, in the hope that this might get me back into it. I mean what if I said I had to see at least ten bird species per day? Or twenty? Yes, ten isn't enough and I wouldn't actually have to look, but twenty might mean I have to think about it a little bit, and importantly, devote a bit of time to it, as that's where I've largely fallen down of late.

In the meantime, bird happiness has been provided by lots and lots of Moussier's Redstarts which I have been furiously editing. I'm really pleased how they have come out, but it's in the editing process that I realise all the little things that I could have done slightly differently. There's nothing for it, I'll have to go back....

On being last

Despite the name of this blog, I'm currently lying in last place in the unofficial annual Wanstead listing competition that Nick always wins. This is both very satisfying and quite worrying. To be fair this has been threatening for some time, I just don't get out of it as much as I used to. But at the same time I know that once I get into a groove I do start enjoying it, albeit in a perverse kind of way as particularly at this time of year it really is same old same old. For instance I have yet to see a Chaffinch in the UK, which is pathetic in the extreme, yet also quite exciting - how long could I string not seeing a Chaffinch out for? I mean, could I get to February? That would be sensational!

As predicted my Morocco list is longer than my Wanstead (and hence UK) list this year. And with another trip to Morocco on the horizon, this could easily continue. I would have addressed this pitiful state of affairs this weekend, but unfortunately I have been struck down with a highly vicious (and I do mean highly vicious) tummy complaint, which means I have been confined to my bed since Friday evening. Whether or not this is some African gift I have no idea, but I was quite looking forward to going to Hove where that Phalarope has been hanging around at point blank range. Not because I wanted to take pictures of it you understand, but because I wanted to berate all the pillocks that turned up in camo clothing to photograph it in a children's play area. Unfortunately I have had to miss out on this singular delight.

Tragically, I will probably be well enough to go to work tomorrow, and so my entire weekend will have been a complete write-off. The only saving grace is that by only consuming approximately four pieces of penne and a slice of toast since Friday lunchtime, I have managed to shed almost half a stone, and it ain't over yet if you get my drift. At least I'm also getting quite a lot of time in which to go through the images from Morocco. Illness aside, this also explains my reluctance to go and slog the patch or compete with a bunch of camotwats in Sussex. A load of boring birds that I see all the time, with a load of obnoxious dog-walkers thrown into the mix, or just me and a Great Grey Shrike on a sunny hillside with views to die for? Then again, maybe I am currently dying for those views....

Guess how much camo clothing this required?