Red Letter Days

2007 has been the year we have started birdwatching in earnest: see A Birdie Year. We are very lucky living where we do: Yarner Wood, the best place in the South West to see Pied Flycatchers, is 15 minutes down the road. 15 minutes in another direction will take you to the High Moor (Golden Plover at this time of year; Skylarks and Meadow Pipits for much of the Spring and Summer; and always the magical Ravens), or to Soussons Woods or the Fernworthy Plantations. Only a little longer and we can be on Dawlish Warren, watching waders along the Exe, or Slavonian Grebes and Common Scoters off shore.

We never know quite what we are going to see, and rarely set out with the intention of finding a particular bird. We don’t have life lists, and such records as we keep are more to help us remember what we have had the good fortune to watch, than to boast of our sightings. I see each day we are out as a red letter day, but some this past twelve months have been the reddest of such days: the afternoon of 14 April, with leafbreak just happening in Yarner and the first Pied Flycatchers arriving; the Ravens on Snowdon as we came off the Bwlch Main in very early May; the trip to the lighthouse at the tip of the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge on Nantucket Island in October. These are days that will live in the memory.

To desire some good friends. . .

As I look forward to 2008, and consider what resolutions I should perhaps make, I realise that Samuel Johnson said it all before, and that I can do no better than follow him:

Not to marry a young Woman.

Not to keep young company, unless they really desire it.

Not to be peevish, or morose, or suspicious.

Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.

Not to be fond of children.

Not to tell the same Story over and over to the same People.

Not to be covetous.

Not to neglect decency, or cleanliness, for fear of falling into Nastiness.

Not to be oversevere with young People, but give allowances for their youthful follys and weaknesses.

Not to be influenced by or give ear to knavish tattling servants, or others.

Not to be too free of advice, nor trouble any but those that desire it.

To desire some good Friends to inform me which of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, & wherein; and reform accordingly.

Why choose Eversheds?

Lovely mention in Lucy Kellaway’s not-to-be-missed column in the FT today, awarding Eversheds the Martin Lukes Creovation gold award for using some quite astonishingly awful copy when looking for trainee lawyers. Apparently Eversheds want people who are knowlivators (knowledgeable motivators), proactilopers (proactive developers) and five other clumping concepts that sound more like dinosaurs than legal eagles. I rushed off to the Eversheds website, to see if this was really true, but got no further than the “Why choose Eversheds” page. Apparently they hire people who have personality and a sense of humour. I can only assume that whoever wrote the advertisement for trainees (if that is what it was) had been exercising the latter; and if he or she hadn’t, that the Eversheds board does!

Historical error

Poor old David Starkey. Attributing a quotation to Goebbels, he has attracted a rash of letters in The Sunday Telegraph, castigating him both for his apparent criticism of the Sovereign (did Starkey really say, “I don’t think she’s at all comfortable with anybody intellectual. I think she’s got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude – you remember, he said: ‘Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver’.”) and, worse for a historian, getting it wrong. It was said, apparently, either by Goering (I have always been told this) or by the German playwright Hanns Johst (who merely reached for the safety catch of his Browning). I have always rather liked the apparent retort, by whom I know not, “Everytime I hear the word gun, I reach for my culture”.

Opinion, not knowledge

Apparently, if experts are to be believed, coley tastes like cod (or so the Daily Telegraph reports today, ‘Cod diners to get a taste for Coley’). Quite how these experts arrived at this conclusion, and why we should take their word for it, I am not sure. Coley was a regular feature of school dinners when I was a child. That may have been quite a long time ago, but I can assure you that coley did not taste like cod then, and nothing will persuade me that it does now.