GULLSHITTING – THE RISE OF EGO IN BIRDING.

There have always been those in birding who command the respect of their peers by means of knowledge; erudition; skills and general gravitas. People the like of the extremely knowledgeable, but self–effacing P. J. Grant and Peter Hayman; men who’s articles on identification and distribution made a massive and meaningful contribution to the library of ornithological data. To read a publication like British Birds was to feel enlightened and that a key piece of identification had been unearthed; these people knew what they were talking about. A whole generation looked up to these writers and birders.

Then came the boom in the popularity of birding. Suddenly, Experts abounding, filling all available space. People with very little experience could be heard fulminating on subjects like the primary pattern of Oriental Plover or some other esoteric and almost mythical species, even though most of them had never heard of them three weeks earlier, never mind seen them in the field. These included The Gullshitter. A generic term; not confined to gull identification – they could just as well be Warblershitters or Wadershitters. Any small fact (or fantasy) they could propound upon to raise their profile. They have a Blog and a Vlog. They give talks on their local patch to people who have difficulty with Dunnock and want that definitive shot of Kingfisher. They lead tours around small nature reserves and tell all that will listen on social media how brilliantly it went. They always describe themselves on the social media as ‘ornithologist’; 'writer'; 'birding expert' or ‘tour leader, The Gullshitter… pronouncing at length on the identification of subspecies of gulls/warblers etc; using splitting techniques that would cast several races of humans into different species.

You can hear them at a rarity; loudly exhorting the surrounding throngs where it is; what it is doing; the fact that it is calling; what the field marks are, sometimes unfortunately on the wrong bird. Their Facebook account is full of constant self-aggrandisement. You long for the days before the internet, when an ‘experts’ reputation was built on respect; fieldcraft and production, rather than ego and who can shout the loudest.

Thank fuck I am not an "expert".

Rant over

Just a thought.

Has public opinion of our police ever been so low. They don't attend burglaries; you can walk into any shop in the UK and take what you want. Response time to ordinary 'crime' is non-existent. In fact I imagine most people think that the only time most of the idle fat bastards get out of their cars, is to go into KFC for a monster bucket.

Of course; do 32mph in a 30 zone and bam, you're fucked.

Where are the plod when the arsehole is wheelieing down your street as your kids cross the road?

Where is Plod when there is a gang of yobboes swearing and throwing stuff around outside your house ant midnight?

Where are the 'Boys in Blue' when some ratboy is forcing your door at two in the morning?

Wonder what Plod is doing when your Mam daren't go to the shop after 4 o'clock?

I'll tell you: they are sitting in their big (foreign built) cars; talking about who's wife they shagged last week and how they are going shooting on the estate that shot the Golden Eagles last week (fucking vermin those eagles...)

Plod is a laughingstock in modern Britain. As it says on the sign on the A17 - 'Speeding motorists caught this year 2,578' Sprayed underneath: 'Burglars caught NONE'.

It is an old chestnut, but these people need to get back into the communities they are supposed to protect.

PAPERS

In 1900 everyone in the world bought a newspaper, sometimes more than one. Admittedly, there weren’t as many folk about in those days but there were about one and a half billion people. Allowing for the folk buying several newspapers, we’ll call it two billion. These newspapers didn’t have any pictures, apart from a few cartoons of the Prince of Wales and his ilk. The words were very small and had ‘f’ instead of ‘s’. Still, the plebs lapped them up and the rulers seethed at constantly being portrayed as fat scrounging arseholes. Now, in the 21^st century, the world population in seven billion plus and newspaper circulation in the UK, is in the low millions. Of these, 97% of papers sold are The Sun and The Mail. These right wing and reactionary rags sell to the Great Unwashed because they feature: tits; celebrities; football and what bastards immigrants are.

                The average Sun reader will get up in the afternoon; have a fag; watch Jeremy Kyle and then amble down to the newsagents, or ‘Paki Shop’, as they like to term it. They will take their staffie, also known as the Guide Dog for the Thick, so it can have a shit on someone’s lawn and also scare any old person they may meet.  After buying their rag they will tell Mt Singh (who is a Sikh and comes from India) that ‘You fuckin’ Pakis and Polacks are taking our fuckin’ jobs. He will then amble back in time for Celebrity Antiques Roadtrip, allowing adequate time for Ripper to shit in someone’s drive.

                On his sofa, he will read, in words of five letters or less, roughly what he told Mr Singh; look at the football scores (he supports Man Utd even though he lives 300 miles away) and toss the rag onto the floor-bin, with the soiled nappies and the dogshit. He will then request that his light of love bring him some ‘fuckin’ beer’; tell her to shut the fuckin’ kid up and fall asleep, whereupon, Ripper will piss on his leg, thus securing his trip to the dog rescue centre, where he will be put down. Some Sun readers however, read the ‘paper’ while driving their white vans at 90 mph through town, while texting, egged on by a spotty youth on an ‘apprenticeship’.

                Readers of the ‘Quality’ papers such as the Guardian and the Times, don’t actually buy any newspapers. Their readership read the paper online, where the adblocker removes any unwanted distractions. In the case of the Times and the Telegraph (which is the Mail with bigger words), no one reads online either, as you have to pay. What has brought newspaper readership into such decline. One factor is that the papers are full of shite. There is no news in the redtops and biased and or government directed bullshit in the ‘qualities’. Why is this?

                Well, once, long ago the way to the top of the newspaper industry went like this:

                You got a job as an apprentice printer, where you spent your life up to the bollocks in ink, sorting out the mess that had developed when Cedric, the Head Printer had tipped all the lowercase B’s into the D into the same box and getting a crust of bread for your lunch.  Then, through dint of hard work, you progressed to being a printer. Then after you had spent six years at technical college (remember those?) you penned a letter to the Editor who was impressed and set you on as a junior reporter, where you started at the bottom again, writing accounts of how many times Prince Teddy farted at the annual Review of the Navy. Eventually you become Editor and after that owner of the paper, whereupon you spent most of your time getting pissed with Winston Churchill and buying up Somerset.

                These days, to become a newspaper magnate, you either: get your Daddy to buy you a paper; accumulate wads of cash by slightly dodgy means and buy one as a hobby or have one given to you, because it is fucked and  because you once raised the profit of a chain of shops by half a percent, before robbing it blind and stealing the pension fund, people think you can help. You are surrounded by sycophants and then the reason dawns on you – these papers aren’t making any money because NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE FUCK THEY ARE DOING.

                There are two main reasons for this. One is that a lot of the people employed got their jobs because of what school/college they went to and not because they knew anything. These people are irrelevant, because they don’t actually do anything except get pissed at five hour lunches and screw the secretaries/each other. The main reason however, and this is the pisser, are the vast amounts of people who have arrived at the job, because they have a degree. Not just any degree, but a degree in Media Studies. This is a meaningless and useless qualification (equivalent to the PPE degree that qualifies you to be PM, or at least towel-folder to an MP, while you become PM). It has no relevance to the world of journalism. It is the reason that the papers are so badly misspelled, even in headlines. It is the reason that the papers are full of drivel and it is the reason, when these drones are promoted that the papers are fucked. These people don’t know shit from chocolate; they have no idea how to run a paper, it wasn’t in Journalism 1; nobody told them about stuff like this. So, they just fill the papers with: tits; celebrities; football and what bastards immigrants are, thinking, that this is what the public wants. Add this to the drop in literacy and you have a hiding to nowhere.

               

                

It's All Around us...

It's all around us; it's everywhere; it pervades and insinuates into our very being. What is it? Is it love? Is it humanity? Is it art? Is it poetry? Is it Family?

No - it is dogshit.

(Apologies now to responsible dog owners who do clean up properly.)

Dogshit is ubiquitous and all-surrounding. It is in the parks; on the paths; on the nature reserves; on the roads; in other peoples gardens and on their shoes.  You walk down into town and step through a mountain of dogshit.

Across from me is a playing field. Every morning and evening, up to thirty people take their dogs on the field and let them shit - WHERE THEIR CHILDREN PLAY. They are quite blatant with it and seemingly don't give a toss. People roll up in cars; let three dogs out that shit on the grass and get back in the car - that's your problem, now, not mine and off they drive back to the shit-free zone they inhabit.

What is done about it? I'll tell you - fuck all. I know we live in Mexborough and that DOncaster Council have forgotten about us and that all the dog wardens are in Wheatley Hills, making it a dogshit free zone for the Councillor's kids, while we have to walk in squalor.

Some people do pick their dogshit up in plastic bags and then, in a place like Adwick RSPB - throw it into the bushes, where it hangs, in winter,  like the Devil's wassail cups. You'd be better off leaving it on the path you morons.

You can't blame the dogs. Dogs don't give a fuck where they do it, it is their nature; it is the owners who are at fault.

All dogs should be chipped and a dog license should be £200 per year. This would rule out the morons responsible for the 150 staffies a day that are put down because the morons can't look after them. It would make the real dog-lovers at a premium and rule out the idiots who don't know how to look after and monitor their dogs.

As you can probably tell: I have just walked in off the field with dogshit all over my shoes. Thank you morons.

DIGITAL - WE ARE LOSING OUR HERITAGE.

The descendents of John Law are sitting in the ruins of Mexborough High Street in 2287.  They are dressed in skins.  They are cooking in an old bin, over a fire.  One of them says: "Good job those folk in the 2000,s supped loads of tea and left us all these nice silver coasters".

I have got approximately 2,000,000 digital photos on my PC (or so it seems).  Some of them are quite nice. They are all imaginary. They only exist as a series of 1's and 0's in cyberspace.  When civilisation collapses, as it will, (some say it has already), all these images, along with everyone else's will vanish and we will be left with a load of plastic crap that no one will be able to fathom.

Same goes for all the music made after 1920 when records came along. Only the folk world is maintaining a record of any musical heritage.  All will be lost in the fires of our descent back into savagery.

Artists preserve some of todays world in paint or other media, so there will be something. Perhaps some sort of hard copy record of the world today should be made NOW before it's too late.

THIS ENGLAND.

I have just read a book that made me cry.  Not the first time either, as I have read it quite a few times over the years. It is "England Their England" by A G MacDonnell (Macmillan 1933).    I particularly recommend pages 226 - 243.  It is written by a Scotsman in London, not long after WW1, giving a view of the current state of England, from the point of view of a visitor.

It looks at the upper classes and their games; working class people; The League of Nations and more, but the most moving part is the conversation in a country pub, with the old gaffers, some of whose parents had seen Lord Nelson and the like. Lovely quotes such as:  'There is a list of 24 bowmen from the village who went to Agincourt in 1415, eighteen of the same names are on the village war memorial for the Great War'.  Thaey lament the changing state of the country, the change of sos follwing fathers into such trades as thatching, leaving to be mechanics etc.

Another telling quote: " But can you tell me sir, what national honour ever did for me?  I worked the land all my life and the least I earned was 4 and 6 a week and the most 29 shillings.  In 1914 a man came down and gave a speech about 'National Honour', Mind you Sir I was getting 24 shillings a week for 72 hours, but i had to give three sons and eight grandsons to fight for the National honour. Eleven of them, three were killed and two lost legs and what good did that do to them or me, or Mr Davis, or Mr Darley here. We can't afford our beer or our tobacco and the grandsons that weren't killed can't get work."

There is an equally telling piece about the local landowner worrying about his tenants and others about distinct regionalism and accent,  fading away.

What would Cameron, the narrator, say of today's homogenised blend of Briton, where it is almost illegal to be English and the kids talk in a mid-Atlantic argot, punctuated by squeals and shouts of AWESOME from the girls and monosyllabic grunting from the boys.  A land where free speech is more or less forbidden and holding an opinion that is not blessed by the PC Nazis is tantamount to a crime?

Nostalgia for a lost past is a commonplace facet of all society. The lost past involved ricketts and TB; workhouses and illiteracy. It gave us Fascism and world wars. It gave us slavery and discrimination, not only of race, but class as well.  All societies change, but has ours changed for the better?  In some ways: healthcare; technology (like it or not); integration, but hatred is something that brings England into disrepute. The fairness and tolerance of the Englishman is lauded in the book, but I look around and I see the mindless hatred of the Muslim for the Christian and the hatred of the Fascist EDL and BNP for Islam and I despair for our future.

WHO TO VOTE FOR???

I have voted Labour all my life. I am from a mining background in the Labour heartland of South Yorkshire. The Labour party that brought us the NHS, the jewel in the UK's crown,  and the feeling that even Labour politicians, were in touch with the working class however, has gone. They are indistinguishable from the Tories and the LapDogs.
What we have is a bunch of characterless political beasts. whose CV is mainly full of towels folded and arses licked.  Milliband is a buffoon, with no personality, who was made leader to keep his somewhat more charismatic brother out: no personalities in New Labour thank you, may remind us of the conman Blair.  Balls is eponymous. The odious Harperson and the PC brigade have done much to make Labour a laughingstock in the eyes of the voters.
But; who to vote for?
The Tories, who have shown themselves to be in complete harness to their corporate paymasters and have blatantly favoured the rich at the expense of the poor and needy?  The LapDogs, finished as a political force, after selling themselves and their ideals for a sniff of ersatz power? The joke UKIP?

When will the UK see politicians with ideals and a sense of purpose and fair play for ALL?
As Rich Hall said in his Texas programme the other night: 'Politics, from the greek word 'poli' - many and 'ticks', blood-sucking leeches...

HASH BROWNS.

I have just seen a comment on Facebook concerning the traditional 'Full English' breakfast, that asked: 'where are the hash browns?'

Hash browns?  Hash fucking browns?  How long have hash browns been part of the English breakfast?  I'll tell you how long...

Hash browns are part of the trend that makes every young person in the UK think they were born in fucking Springfield; say 'AWESOME' every ten seconds and squeal while tottering about in Keds.

It is why the spell-checker on British NATIONAL newspapers is set to American and asks you if you mean 'realize' when you type realise.

It is why people refer to their butt instead of their arse and why we have Proms FFS!!!! Proms... the kids look nice, but the expense and the overriding sense of smugness is direct from the Great Satan.

As for Trick or Fucking Treating - AAAAAAARRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!

It is people giving you the fucking finger instead  of flagging you off. Bastards.

It is why MTV and its ilk have transformed our kids into clones of Sabrina the Fucking Teenage Witch.

It is why they watch films like Tangled; Epic and all the others, that feature the same young, American teen, with exactly the same persona and annoying voices that our kids emulate.


Get this straight:  hash browns are no more part of an English breakfast than Bart Fucking Simpson goes to Mexborough Comp (although there are quite a few of the little twats that try to be like him!!!!)

BLOODY SCHOOLS

Schools and teachers get a terrible press. I was a teacher and am glad to be out of it. The kids have taken over the asylum.  There is no punishment for anything; no one can win, because that means that some feckless little toerag might lose.  Most of the money schools get goes on making excuses for the disruptive; the stupid; the ignorant and the just plain thick... oh, sorry - the government says there are no thick kids, just bad teachers. Well fuck me, but at my school there are loads of the stupid little tossers. This is the same government that insists that every child shall be above average!

The parents are just as bad. They either don't give a fuck, or are convinced that their little angel couldn't possibly have done anything wronG and anyway the teachers are picking on him. NO THEY ARE NOT; HE/SHE IS A STUPID LITTLE PILLOCK WITH A BAD ATTITUDE.  Oh, but he/she has dyslexia/ADHD. NO THEY DON'T BECAUSE IN MOST CASES THESE ARE JUST A CRUTCH FOR PARENTS OR ARE IAGNOSED SO THE FECKLESS FUCKERS CAN GET MORE BENEFITS.

Don't get me wrong, most kids at school are nice and trying to do their best, but these disruptive little arseholes are ruining everyone else's chances and the system is allowing it, nay, encouraging it!

COLD COMFORT

                        It’s Cold Comfort, when the bitch makes you wait,

                        Just shrugs you aside, when your Giro is late.

                        You’ve no cash for the rent and the kids need their bread.

                        But you need condescension like a hole in the head.

                        She tells you you’ll have to re-take the Means Test:

                        While she’s dripping in gold, on her hands and her chest.

                        And she fucks you off quickly so she can regain,

                        The thoughts she was having of her fortnight in Spain

                        And the marvellous folk on the Costa del Sole,

                        Who’re superior by far from the scum on the Dole.

                        It’s Cold Comfort when the arrogant twat,

                        On the desk at the hostel reminds you that:

                        You can’t have a bed if you’re twenty pence shy

                        Of the two pounds you need for a bed in the sty.

                        He’s no time for grovelling;  cajoling or pleas,

                        As he fiddles about with his new Volvo’s keys,

                        And fucks you off quickly so he can go home,

                        To his semi-detached and his new mobile phone

                        And his pretty young wife who just can’t understand,

                        Why there’s so many homeless in Cardboard Box land.

                        It’s Cold Comfort, when you’re watching the telly,

                        You don’t have a licence or food in your belly.

                        Then a well-fed rock singer starts singing a ditty

                        About Children in Need, or the tough inner-city.

                        He’s chock full of shite about helping the needy,

                        And although he’s got millions he’s so bloody greedy,

                        That to fuck off abroad’s his contingency measure,

                        In case Labour gets in and curtail all his pleasure.

                        Then he’d get in his Learjet and head for the sun.

                        And he’ll try to forget about his roots in the slum.

                        It’s Cold Comfort, when you’re trying so hard

                        And Society seems to be marking your card.

                        You can’t get ahead, no one seems to encourage,

                        The dregs of the System, we’ll never flourish.

                        Though what would the owners of Water or Gas

                        Do if ten million poor put a kick up their arse,

                        And claimed what was theirs from the wealth of the Nation,

                        A decent existence and pride in their station

                        And a chance to aspire to a place in sun,

                        And to stop eating shite while the Fat Cats have fun.

What the fuck is happening to the world?

What the fuck is happening to the world?  I walked down into Mexborough yesterday, something I won't be doing again for a while.  What has the place become?  First you have to negotiate the piles of dogshit that line the route up Doncaster Road and into town.  Loads of it.  Then, after walking past the raft of pizza/kebab/shite shops (yes, the same ones that insist on posting loads of leaflets through your letterbox, even though you are never going to eat any of the noxious crap), you come to town.

Litter and fag ends coat the roads.  Hordes of kids roam round, that are obviously of school age. The 18 year old mothers, fill up with pasties and sausage rolls from Gregg's, then waddle back to the pushchair (where the baby has no shoes and socks on, even though it is freezing and mam is wearing three coats ), she goes straight into baby's gob with the Gregg's Dummy or sausage roll as it is known.

Let's look at Typical Mummy.  She is nineteen years and stone. She has three kids by three different Dad's who all left because the kids were 'doin his ead in'. One is brown.  She has greasy hair in a ponytail; fatlass joggers (or jimjams and dressing gown, at times) that show her arse antler tattoo. Improbably high heels that her arse causes to overbalances, (well, it is the size of Cleethorpes).  She has a fag on and a steak bake half eaten in her hand.  She has kids called Jaden; Jordan and Jastra and she wants to be a pop star... She looks towards the light of her life and the father of her next Giro Booster - Ratboy!!!

Ratboy, well what can you say?  thin and pasty, with dirty trainers; dirty joggers; dirty baseball cap and can of Special Brew in hand and fag on. Ratboy is seventeen. He hasn't been to school since year nine because it 'did is ead in'. He cannot read or write to any great extent and has never had a job.  He has rotten teeth and one at the front is missing. As well as having Fatlass up the duff he already has one 'up Swinton' that he has never seen; 'well, she worra slag wa'nt she?' He has several large and poorly done tattoos and two hundred quid a time and an air of slightly menacing dullness.  He calls softly to his beloved, 'Gerra fuckin move on yer fat cow am fuckin freezin, it's doin me ead in'. She bows her head, stuffs the rest of the steak bake into her gob, past the bad teeth and follows him.

There are 52 pairs of Fatlass and Ratboys in the High Street.

Move on past the Bull, where Skint Eastwood holds court in all his Wild West glory, then past the Cheap Shops; charity shops; cash converters; pawnbrokers; market stalls full of tat; amusement arcades and bookies. This is the Great British High Street we are meant to be preserving...  A smell of dope wafts from the tattoo place and a teenager who should be at school wheelies through the crowd, followed by his gran, with her dyed scarlet hair, fag on and driving an invalid motor erratically along the street.

A cry lingers through the balmy morning, it is the cry of the stupid and the feckless; of the lost and the dull: "GEREER JADEN YER DOIN ME FUCKIN EAD IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

A TEN YEAR PLAN

Tomorrow will see the culmination of a plan a decade in the making.  Some years ago a plan was made to walk the entire Yorkshire coast from the tip of Spurn Point to the South Gare in Redcar. We set off (Roy Machin and I) and walked over three days up to Brid. The next stage I did from Brid to Flamborough, then over the years: Flamborough to Filey; Filey to Scarborough; Scarborough to Ravenscar; Ravenscar to Whitby.

Tomorrow I will be doing the South Gare to Saltburn bit, leaving only the Saltburn - Whitby left to do.  Good eh?

Some good memories from the way: Finding filter coffee in a shed in Withernsea; 1500 breeding pairs of Sand Martin between Spurn and Brid; having to walk round the bombing range at Cowden; finding out I was old when I realised it was easier walking uphill than down in the cloughs near Scarborough; dropping on and playing at a music night in Hornsea, etc.

What to plan next though?  Spurn to home along Humber etc (on bike maybe)?

BLOODY PARTIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Took four hours to take out monumental pile of bottles and two binliners of fag ends, THE TIDY UP. All booze gone and all settings on PC changed to somebody else's - TOP NEET.

Good turn out from mates, birders well in attendance. Much drunkeness was displayed by all concerned.  Went to bed at 3.30 and left em too it!!!

Well here I am. Bloody sixty years old!!!!!  Where did it all go? Well: Birding; playing music; boozing; travelling; having as good a time as possible. Work came as well, but mostly not too bad. I have good friends and a lovely family. What more could I want except to be 25 again, but not now, not now. In 1974 perhaps...
I am just waiting for my family and close friends to get here for a drink prior to a piss-up of MONUMENTAL stature.  Wish me well...

Back at Spurn on Wednesday to deliver the collage painting to Jean in the Crown: Fecking Freezing. Wind direct from Scandinavia held the whiff of Grozzer, but it was not to be. Good on the sea though, with Common Scoter moving; a couple of Great Northern Divers and Leach's Petrel.  A few Waxwings went through, but little in the line of passerines.

Lunch in Easington with the Square Meal old ladies and some of the residents.  Spurn is a great; desolate and wind-blown place. Why anyone would actually choose to live there is more of a mystery.  Cold and unwelcoming in winter; full of ticks and moth hairs in summer; it is twenty miles to a supermarket in the strange and inbred Withernsea and a decent hospital is even farther away in Hull or Scarborough. These are things you have to think about as you get older.  Still, everyone to their own.

Cards and other paintings can be bought direct. See my work on here: https://www.facebook.com/JohnLawArt

Let the hibernation commence.

Penultimate visit to Spurn for this Autumn. Quiet, but a few birds about, had a nice walk round and took some photos for paintings. A few pints in the afternoon with Jodie :Love and then went back to the sub-zero interstice in normal temperature that is the Warren Cottage. Soon remedied that by building a fire and settling down with lager and Boardwalk Empire. Good Firday night in the pub where much derision was cast on the above JL and Vlad the Impala, Zulu vampire was discussed. On the way back, got behind one of the old fuckers Hull council pays to drive back and forth to Kilnsea, at 20 mph. Listen to me old farts: DRIVING AT THAT SPEED IS NOT GOOD DRIVING, IT IS SHITE AND CAUSES ACCIDENTS. AND TAKE THAT FUCKING HAT OFF WITH THE FEATHERS IN THE BAND, YOU TOOL!!!!! On return home, looked out some old amnd hopefully embarrassing photos to put on FB; went to fireworks with Andy to meet Finn, then bath and loafing.

Fat Lasses Win Award

Goldthorpe was resounding last night after the announcement that it is the winner of this year's Fat Lass Spotters Award. It won first prize in the "Largest Arse" category, won with an arse the size of Cleethorpes by Mrs Edna Scrubber of Main Street and also a special mention in the "Looking Like the Elephants Loading up on Dumbo" category, for the queue outside the credit union, where the resident fat lasses waited six hours to borrow £20 to spend on Pies From Elmhurst. A special unit for the treatment of arse related diseases has been set up in the tap oyle of the Oss n Groom. Free voucher with every pound of lard bought from Premier Discount.

As a birder I am always looking at the weather on the TV and on the net. Why do they change their bloody minds from day to day? Looked at the weather forecast for Spurn two weeks ago; great - banging easterlies and top conditions. Booked in to the obs and what do they do: change their bloody minds to light westerlies FFS!!!!! Best thing they can do is get rid of all that bloody gear; ebay is an option; give 20 observers throughout Britain a piece of seaweed and a pine cone; make them go outside and see if the bloody cows are sitting down or not and do it that way. Or guess, which is what I'm sure they do anyway. Dog walkers: why the bloody hell do yo pick up your dog's shit; put it in a plastic bag, then throw it in the trees? If you can't look after the bloody things properly have them put down and do us all a fucking favour!!!!

Autumn iis Here!!!!

Well, It's bloody freezing again and appears to have been so since my last post in April. Rain and more rain. Saying that, I was at Spurn for four days last week and it was warm, mostly.Spurn is the 2nd driest place in the UK!! Top time with the lads as well. Lots of birds, which brought a fall of people with all the gear and no idea! The photographers made sure the Shrike and the LEO were well kicked about, still, all4; Y B Warbler; R B Fly; Greenish etc were worth it.

BLOODY WEATHER...

Looked out today on the snowy landscape and did some serious thinking... yes... go to baths. Strangely there was only us in. Took the Finnster and had a whale of a time, then; to further the delights went to Burger King and watched grandson tear about like a lunatic for 90 minutes in the play thing.

Got to say: even I felt sylph-like compared to the obese bastards in there with their fat kids. It was like Goldthorpe on giro day; like the queue outside the Credit Union where the dolies borrow twenty quid to get pissed on the day before giro day.

Had to drive through every big puddle on way home so the Finnster could see, now he has a big boy booster seat in the front!!!