It's a gorgeous evening. I have just been out in the garden for an hour. The birdsong here is amazing from the crack of dawn until the sun sets and it's a very relaxing end to the day.
The birds sound particularly cheerful tonight. In the pond there were fish and tadpoles darting about near the surface and the water snails were getting a bit amorous. I am pretty sure that two of the snails were "doing it"....
My mate Lindsay reckons that snails are genderless so probably they were just having a kiss and cuddle in the sunshine. I might have to go on to Wikipedia when I've finished this to find that out.
I have just finished up my nightly patrol of the garden with the knapsack sprayer on the lookout for ground elder.
Anyway, I've just sat down in the garden room with a newspaper and a G&T (What? That's OK isn't it? Come on, it's Thursday - it's almost the weekend). There's a woodburning stove in here. Just a minute ago I heard a kerfuffle in the stove; obviously it's not lit so I was somewhat perplexed. Not scared. I'm a man - I don't get scared. I was perplexed, OK?
I looked up to see a little sparrow flying around in there behind the glass - it must have flown all the way down the flue. Clearly I was tempted to leave it there as a feature but, since Graham Wynne and I are now bestest mates, my conscience got the better of me. I wasn't sure how to best effect the birds emancipation, however. In the end I opened the french doors and then opened the door to the stove. The sparrow took one look at me, scowled and flew with high speed and precision into one of the glass doors and brained its self.
This reminded me of something that happened in my last house. It had big inglenook fireplaces with wide chimneys so birds were always flying in and out as the mood took them.
One day I came home and there was a note from the cleaning lady. She hadn't been able to find a pen or paper so it was written on a piece of kitchen roll with a marker pen. It was quite difficult to decipher. It appeared to say "There's a bird shit in the dining room." This language seemed out of character. Probably she had contracted Tourettes syndrome from me, I thought.
Three of four days later I went into the dining room. To my suprise, there was a starling perched on the light fitting. I realised that the note had actually said "There's a bird SHUT in the dining room." Although as it turned out by this point there was also a great deal of bird shit in the dining room too.
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