This week’s personal pearl of wisdom – ‘never start anything you’re not willing to continue’.
What began as a compassionate gesture has turned into a tyranny. It’s all the robin’s fault.
On these bleak winter mornings I stagger to the kitchen at seven. By three minutes past, in the still pitch dark, the robin lands on the blue bin lid and regards me through the window, its beady eye glistening with expectation.
This is my cue to postpone preparations for my own breakfast because I have to make toast for the robin, who retires to the top of the oil-tank, waits till it’s ready, cooled, crumbed and served, eats its fill and flies off, fit to burst out of its little red waistcoat.
Sentimentally, I like to think of it as my special robin, though I dare say it does exactly the same thing at every kitchen window in our road, but it recognises a soft touch when it sees one.
Creeping daylight invariably brings a couple of disappointed-looking thrushes to peck at the leavings. Sorry boys – it’s the early bird that gets the toast. Obviously the robin has ‘sung’, advertising widely on the bird bush-telegraph that there’s early opening and rich pickings at No 35, because my back garden’s become an aviary. (‘Garden’ isn’t actually an accurate description. More an impenetrable tangle of trees, whins, bracken and briars – or ‘naturalised woodland’ as I like to call it.)
I live on a semi-rural road with a beech glen out one side which hosts a colony of crows; on the other, a dense clump of 30 foot evergreens (species unknown) houses a flock of magpies and in between wood-pigeons, who squat on the electricity wires and poo all over my car. And they all hate each other. The dawn chorus is discordant as an amateur rendition of the 1812 overture.
There are also two squirrels and an elderly and arthritic hedgehog. Previous tenants, the mother fox and her twin cubs have obviously moved somewhere quieter – and I don’t blame them. I was born and brought up a ‘townie’, with nature study never my strongest subject. Nor were there too many opportunities for birdwatching or identification in the housing estates I taught in, where trees rarely got beyond sapling stage before they were vandalised. I’m belatedly fascinated by the variety of bird life outside my back door and deeply ashamed of my ignorance. I could watch all day the brief flashes of colour as little nameless winged things somersault through the branches of the one surviving apple tree.
Last week, in temperatures so low you wouldn’t put milk bottles out, I was on snow patrol, feeling honour bound to extend my charity to the robin’s friend, scouring the cupboards for suitable fare – pumpkin and sunflower seeds, (relics of a shortlived healthy eating phase); Tesco Finest California raisins, bought for a cake never made, nubbins of cheese, bacon scraps, stale biscuits. Would you believe they turned their beaks up at the out-of-date cherry scones – ungrateful little beggars. I was mildly miffed. The squirrels scoffed the lot and made no complaints.
Why not, you may ask, go to a pet shop and buy proper bird food? Because, dear reader, the smell in the pet shops makes me nauseous. Going in for cat litter in the days of the late and unlamented Cloudy, the foundling cat, I used to have to take a deep breath and hold it till I got out again.]
Now I’m engaged in a daily one-woman battle with the forces of nature, running out to flap a tea towel at the murderous crows and the villainous magpies who settle silently in the surrounding trees and stealthily draw nearer branch by branch in a manner spookily Hitchcockian, to get first dibs on the goodies. I threw out the half-picked skeletons of two lamb chops and provoked an aerial combat not seen since the Battle of Britain. Nature, red in beak and claw…
Roll on Spring when they can fend for themselves and I can get a lie-in.
