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Pouring gin up your arse: the facts

As a result of my request for information on whether consuming gin by pouring it up your arse gets you more drunk than by oral consumption (see below), I received this authoritative email from an anaesthetist, who I am pretty sure will want to remain anonymous!

... it is true that you can get pissed more quickly (though probably not more pissed) by pouring gin up your arse... though I should add that this is not something that I have tried, nor can I find any reputable papers on the subject (and I have actually looked cos the alternative is to watch someone's blood clot in the lab. I hate nights.). It's because the alcohol is then absorbed through the rectum, into veins which bypass the liver (the veins in the rest of the gut go through the liver before going back to the heart) thus bypassing 'first pass' metabolism in the liver. Unfortunately, the effect is limited as the liver enzyme which breaks down alcohol gets very quickly saturated so after the first drink or two there probably wouldn't really be any difference in drunkenness between the oral and the anal drinkers.

So there you have it. Never ever say that this website is not an essential resource.

17th October, Filey

Before you read my latest feeble offering, check out this inspiring bit of birdspotting writing from the Punkbirders. This was news to me, but apparently rare birds have to get spotted by birdspotters before they get put out on the pager. Apparently some birdspotters can actually find rare birds without the use of 250 characters of instructions and a grid reference. Hats off to them for their high skills work at skoring rare on Shetland, which has surely now landed them with a lifetime banning order from the resident Shetland birdspotters?

And now back to some more old crap about wanky twitching…

Wow, a Two-barred Greenish Warbler. What the fuck’s one of them? I’m sure a lot of people said when they heard about this amazing trans-Atlantic vagrant at Filey. Personally I thought it meant two Barred x Greenish Warbler hybrids and I almost didn’t go. But I did go. And then I found out that I can’t tick it because the BTOU haven’t rung it or something like that, I’m not too sure about the exact specifics of taxonomy. Anyway, what an utterly pointless and tick absent trip. I saw a Radde’s Warbler, which was rubbish because I’ve seen them before. Suppose I’d better elaborate on the day…

… traffic traffic traffic near to Tadcaster, but thankfully I had a wicked CD to listen to by an obscure Scandinavian 70s prog-rock group called Hannu Jannes. This was a way-out psychadelic experimental album called The Calls of Eastern Vagrants featuring a line up, amongst others, of Tapio Aalto on vocals, Per Alstrom on keys & sax, Arnoud B van den Berg on bass, Krister Mild on electric mandolin and Magnus Robb on bassoon. It was really chilled out and mellow, the kind of ambient music you’d want to inhale mild narcotics to, or shoot up to on the Alexandra Road estate, or pour gin up your arse to (apparently it gets you more drunk that way - can anyone confirm whether this is true? Please email me). My favourite track was the coincidentally titled Two-barred Greenish Warbler, a real minimalist offering with only a repeated three syllable motif barely developed upon, which recalls certain works of the 60s by composers such as La Monte Young and Steve Reich. To be honest, I only bought The Calls of Eastern Vagrants because I thought the title implied that it was some kind of right-wing political tool for uncovering illegal Uzbek immigrants working in kebab houses.

As soon as I arrived I briefly acquainted myself with a Two-barred Greenish Warbler, which looked just like a Greenish Warbler. Tick! Or not. Who cares, it’s going on my list regardless. Simple rule: if I have to fill the car with petrol and waste nearly two hours moving just 1.5miles along the A64 to get to Filey then there’s absolutely no way on Earth that that isn’t going on my British birdspotting list. Anyone who says otherwise can pull fireworks out of cats' arses on November 5th.

After our brief encounter it vanished from the car park and then turned up in the Arndale Ravine, where it looked just like an Arctic Warbler. Oriental birding fanatic James Eaton was able to fill me in with his vast knowledge of eastern Phylloscs and a rather succinct identification summary of the Greenish Warbler complex, which basically went something like this: They all look the same. It’s all bollocks. You can only do them on call. Well I heard it call twice, who else did? Come on, own up, not many of you. Therefore I can count it. People who didn’t hear it call can’t count it. Not that you can count it anyway. If you follow me. Fuck it. Who cares. I’m having it. On my list. Along with Bridled Guillemot and Preston Wren.

Top Scrub was holding a Radde’s Warbler, and with impeccable timing I arrived with Stef Thorpe to see it acting so tame that it was sat in a birdspotter’s hand - surely an indication of captive origin? All Phylloscoscopusopus Warblers are proper mint, and the sexual appeal of them has, I believe, been discussed with intellectual rigour over on George Bristow’s Secret Freezer. Just look at that photo below and then tell me you didn’t have to make a quick dash for the water closet - liars!

It’s true: leaf warblers = party in my pants. There’s a well known tale about a massive autumn fall of leaf warblers on the north Norfolk coast involving over 500 Chiffchaffs, 350 Willow Warblers, 7 Wood Warblers, 16 Yellow-browed Warblers, 3 Pallas’s Warblers and a Dusky Warbler. The finder - who we shall call Steve Beehive, as that’s his name (even though this is all bollocks) - suffered from such an immense party in his pants at the sights and sounds before him that his testicles haemorrhaged to the size of a water melon and caused serious friction burns to his thighs as he ran back to his car to fetch a packet of Handy Andies.

Chips and cheeseburger for luncheon, from the Filey NCCP café, preceded a walk along the cliff top, where a Meadow Pipit kept following me and giving me strange looks, a Red-throated Diver kept diving inbetween bouts of giving me strange looks, and a Common Tern flew past presumably giving me a strange look but it was too distant to see for certain. Redwings were leaping off the paths as I wandered about along a circuit that took me back to the Arndale Ravine and a crowd of people looking up into the canopy. More neck breaking views of what now looked like a Yellow-browed Warbler and then a text message telling me there was someone watching the bird behind me - Seamus Cole himself! Fresh out of a meeting and kitted out in his shirt and tie, I joined him on the bank where we used Bluetooth to exchange childish multimedia files from our mobile phones, much to the annoyance of the assembled miserable bastards below us (below in social standing and not altitude).

So there you have it. A day out at Filey and the best bird ever. Ever. Even better than American Coot. And that’s really saying something.

Nice photos on Graham Catley's Pewit blog.

Another Place    Aurora Borealis    Bogbumper    Charlie's Bird Blog    Cork Birding    George Bristow's Secret Freezer   

Joe's Birding Blog    Josh Jones's Blog    The Masturbating Ornithologist    Menzie Birding    The Not Very Big Year   

Punkbirder    Tom and Zoe    Vectis Birder    Will Bowell's Ad-Lib

16th October, Chorlton Water Park & Audenshaw Reservoir

No! No! This can’t be happening. Aaarrgghh!!!!! So near, yet so far! Nooooooo! Let me start at the beginning…

… it was all going so nicely: another Treecreeper, the first Siskin of the autumn, more Tufties, a passage Meadow Pipit and great weather. But then came the cruel blow. Stood on Barlow Tip I saw 6-7 Crows being stupid, and upon binocularised inspection discovered they were mobbing something bigger than them. Buzzard? I thought to myself, but then realised this was no Buzzard but a Harrier - aarrgghh! The fucker flew straight into the sun and then vanished behind the sub-station. AARRGGHH! More than likely a Hen Harrier, but could easily have been Pied or Cinereous. Fucking birds.

A night with the gulls at Audenshaw again, and tonight 2 adult Yellow-legged Gulls, also a possible 2nd winter but by that point the light was so bad that Lesser Black-backeds stood on the sides looked like Jackdaws. They actually were Jackdaws - 130+ of them as well. Sweet. I also heard my first ever Manchester Rock Pipit, which I celebrated by not looking at it.

11th October, Kilbaha, Co.Clare

I don’t normally get wound up over birds and birding. If I see a good bird then that’s just great. And if not? Well it’s really not the end of the World. When I dipped out on the Purple Martin a couple of years ago I really should have been seriously pissed off, but in reality I’m not sure I gave a shit. Okay, I would have been overjoyed to have seen it, but my take on the situation was that I was at one of the most remote and scenically spectacular places in Britain, possibly Europe, the kind of place where 95% of the British population will never even visit in their entire lives and the remaining 5% will visit perhaps just once as part of a long holiday that has been planned well in advance. Yet here were a couple of hundred people visiting this place at short notice for only a matter of hours, not even a full day. Half a day out on Lewis = good skills.

Because what was the alternative to dipping Purple Martin at the Butt of Lewis in fantastic late summer sunshine? Well for me it would have been a day in rainy scum-hole Manchester moaning about how much I wished I’d gone to Lewis to dip Purple Martin. I suspect it was exactly the same for everyone else there, only replace Manchester with Staines, or Ipswich, or Middlesborough.

So there you have it, a philosophically positive approach to the pitfalls of long distance twitchering, and one that I suggest should be adopted universally by everyone stupid enough to have chosen twitchering and rare bird spotting as a past-time.

If only all the above could be said about me and my relationship to this Canada Warbler. Because it’s now time for me to confess; hear me as I fall to my knees and offer myself open (oo er!) and honest to you all, my dear and loyal readers - I was pretty much a wreck for two days waiting to go for this bird. It was so strange, but I had a knot in the pit of my stomach and was having trouble sleeping. And all this over a bird. How fucking lame is that?

I have no idea why, but I desperately needed this bird, and that’s a phrase I despise: I need a bird. No you don’t. You don’t need a bird. You’re fooling yourself if you think you do. There are plenty of things you do need, but a bird is not one of them. You need to take a shit. You need to wipe your arse with The Daily Mail after you’ve taken your much needed shit. You need to listen to AC/DC. And Iron Maiden. And Slayer. And Napalm Death. You need to vomit blood after listening to Sting. And Alanis Morisette. And The Beatles. But you don’t need a bird. Unless you’re me and it’s a Canada Warbler. Then it’s okay. But then and only then, and never at any other time.

So Tuesday night couldn’t have come quicker. I had a paltry couple of semi-conscious hours at McKinney Manor and then set off from Stoke for Stansted just after 2am. I got to Stansted at about 5.30am, parked up and went inside. You’ll notice that this was all being done alone, for my regular birdspotting companions (all 3 of them) had all deserted me. I could have put a message out on the pager offering or wanting a lift, but the last time I did that I ended up with **** from ******** going to see the ******* ********* at ******** ****** in 200* and having to pay out more petrol money than it would have cost me to have seen the bird twice by myself in the old Fiesta and having to put up with his ceaseless complaining. So I’m not really into doing that anymore. By the way, **** if you’re reading this, fuck off!

Stansted was packed with businessy type people, with briefcases and laptops and vast personal stashes of cocaine, allegedly. Wetherspoons was charging £6 for a breakfast (I’m not a cheap skate bastard, but the words six, pounds and Wetherspoons don’t make any sense), Pret a Manger is just too pretentiously wank a name for me to even begin to contemplate buying anything from them, and finally Starbucks is the biggest load of old shit to have ever infected Britain. How I longed for a Greggs the Bakers. So I sat and waited, and starved. For alternative nourishment I bought a novel by Terry Pratchett, the title of which I’ve already forgotten, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Warbler and my concentration was zapped. I managed two pages. Can’t see me getting any further.

Nothing exciting happened on the flight.

Nor in the arrivals area.

The hired car from Budget was there waiting for me on time.

The weather was fantastic.

Doesn’t exactly make for great reading does it when everything goes to plan!

On the way I listened to RTE 2 and the Gerry Ryan show, which could be described as being ever so slightly unusual. It began with a woman from Cork phoning in to say that she had recently been an extra in a big budget Hollywood film being shot in County Cork. She was really really pissed off because throughout the whole day of filming she was never once offered a cup of tea. Gerry listened with sympathy to her harrowing tales of dehydration and then asked other people to phone in with similar tales of poor quality catering on film sets. Quite amazingly they did! Someone from Wicklow phoned in to say that he had also been on the same film shoot and was appalled that the only catering available for them all day long was a fish and chip van and not one single cup of tea - “in this day and age!” he actually said. But then someone else phoned in with a totally different experience to share; he had been an extra on the film set of Braveheart where he had been given regular cups of tea, paid £75 for the day and even given an extra £50 because he had to bring his own horse along to the shoot with him. Read that last sentence again: that’s right, you’re not hallucinating, he really did say that he had to bring his own horse along with him.

Reception for RTE2 became a bit dodgy, so I found Limerick Live95 FM and a programme called Garda Crime, which was asking for help from the public to solve local crimes. The headline story, and request for help, was a cement mixer that had been stolen from the backyard of a house in Limerick, which is either a testament to the wonderfully low crime levels and safe society of Ireland, or the inanity of its radio. You decide.

I made Kilbaha in just over 90 minutes to find a group of about twenty birders on the roadside. I parked sensibly (of course) and joined them to discover that it had just been seen. Sweet! So this should be easy, yeah? Well over an hour later I still hadn’t seen it. Josh Jones and Kit Day were there looking relaxed after having seen it earlier that morning, but I was pretty worried. And then six blokes emerged from out of a hedge to our left telling us that it had been showing well inside there. Pardon? Anyway, that’s private property, you naughty naughty men. Tut-tut! I’d never trespass on someone’s property. Maybe I’ll just go and have a quick peek though. Not that I condone trespassing in any way, shape or form. It’s just selfish and spoils it for everyone else. But just a quick peek, no harm done. Okay? Just a wee tiny peek inside the hedge. Nothing bad. Just a teeny weeny little glance. Surely that won’t cause a problem will it? No, of course not…

Fucking hell! It really was showing in there. Holy bollocks! And this was a proper awesome bird, full of character, beautifully coloured and marked, and in no way anti-climactic, which is occasionally the case with other mega rarities eg Black Lark, which I still maintain was massively overrated.

So there it was, a Canada Warbler. Such a good bird that even Bill Oddie saw fit to mention it on Autumnwatch, and he painted a quality picture of it as well. I even saw a Red-eyed Vireo. How good a day out is that? Well I’ll tell you: that’s an awesome day out!

The rest of the day was spent with Pete Hines, a fellow Chorlton Water Park birder who didn’t know I was going for it and vice versa (we live just two miles from each other!), watching the Canada Warbler in all its Iron Maiden-esque glory, often down to ejaculatory close range, and then having a pint of Guinness in the Lighthouse Pub. Like I said, an awesome day.

The journey back was smooth and uneventful, and I sat with a member of Punkbirder’s infamous Yoof Chapter, Simon Mitchell, on the flight home where we then found ourselves trapped inside the plane at Stansted waiting for the police to arrive and arrest some knob-socket who had been smoking in the toilet. Twat.

Again, an awesome day.

Ireland rules!

And so do Slayer.

Mega pictures on Kit Day's site.

8th October, Chorlton Water Park & Audenshaw Reservoir

The wind had swung around to SE this morning, thus creating a mega passage of Meadow Pipits - 15 over in just one hour. Flip! 4 redhead Goosanders on the river were the first of the autumn and the Tufted flock has increased to a wowzer 17. There are 3 Chiffchaffs still around (or are they passing through?) and a Reed Bunting in the reed bed which was handy as otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to identify it.

***MEGA-ALERT*** late morning - a Roller on Holy Island. Doubt I would have made it in time before the causeway was impassable, so bollocks to it. Then the shit flew from Holy Island to the mainland. I would have made it well before dark. Couldn’t be bothered. Twitching is lame. Only wankers twitch.

To compensate for not going to see the Roller (because twitching is only for twats, dickheads and bastards without lives), later that day I had my third trip to Audenshaw in one single calendar year. Perhaps punishment rather than compensation? Well not at all, because tonight the massive gull roost had both an adult and a 2nd winter Yellow-legged Gull, which rocked. Also a whopping 61 Goosanders. Might start doing Audenshaw a bit more regularly… I bet you’ll look forward to reading about that.

***MEGA-ALERT*** whilst stood on the causeway watching a Mute Swan trying to eat a discarded shoe - a CANADA WARBLER in Ireland. Suddenly twitching no longer seemed to be the preserve of twats, dickheads and wankers without lives. Olive-green-with-an-emerald-hue envy overcame me as I thought of all those fuckers that would be lucky enough to be going tomorrow. Unfortunately The McKinney was committed and unable to go until Wednesday. But would it stay?

4th October, Chorlton Water Park

A House Sparrow in the car park was a relief - haven’t seen one for a while, and I was beginning to worry that they were all dead. Another Meadow Pipit went over east - is it just the same one passing by over and over again? Maybe it’s just doing it to make me feel a bit better. Or maybe not.

A Chiffchaff in song, a male Kestrel and the Little Grebe again were the only other things of note, although the Aythya flock has now increased to an almost unmanageable 10 Tufted Ducks.

3rd October, Chorlton Water Park

Yesterday I received an email from a legendary Berkshire birder (hi Marek!) telling me that Chorlton Water Park had at last made the headlines and achieved its long overdue international recognition by having its own feature in Birdspotting magazine. Unfortunately I don’t buy any magazines anymore, because I’m too tight fisted, so I had to rely on second hand information to tell me that it said in the magazine that Chorlton was good for ducks. It sure is: today I had two species (Tufted and Mallard), or five if you count Great Crested Grebe, Moorhen and Coot as ducks.

A group of 11 Swallows heading south east may well be my last of the year - take care and see you next year, lads! And watch out for those cunts in Malta if you’re heading that way.

2nd October, Chorlton Water Park

The rain’s back again! Probably won’t see any sun now until June 2007. Bastard Manchester. Had my second Chorlton Treecreeper of the year in a tit flock with a couple of Chiffchaffs, which was awesome.

“Treecreeper” sounds a bit like Heatseeker, which is a mediocre song by AC/DC (I’d say they’re nearly past it by this point in their career), and from now on every time you see one you have to sing this to it:

Seriously, sing that to a Treecreeper, and watch carefully as it creeps up and down the trunk. You’ll notice it creeping with a slight Chuck Berry duck walk.

Here’s AC/DC at their peak: Rocker! (Just look at Malcolm Young in the background with a tab hanging out the side of his mouth - and who says smoking isn’t cool?)

AC/DC fucking rule!

30th September, RSPB Bridlington Seabird Cruise

I’ve wanted to do this pelagic for years yet never quite got round to bothering to book it, mainly because I’m a lazy fuck. But with my new pro-active spirit (yeah right), I booked two places and we set off to sunny Brid nice and early.

The Yorkshire Belle was easy to find at the harbour-side by looking for the queue - are you sure that this boat is supposed to take so many people? In the queue we were enchanted by the beauty and grace of a fishing Sandwich Tern, the twisting wonders of a flock of Turnstones, the childlike innocence of the Kittiwake and the shitty browny greyness of a couple of Purple Sandpipers - where, tell me where, is there even a dab of purple colouring?

The seats were wet, and I complained that they didn’t provide hair dryers so that I could dry my seat prior to getting my undercrackers damp. Someone told me to sit down and shut up.

Today’s weather was nice, probably a bit too nice, and the fresh westerly winds were hardly encouraging! Nevertheless the Belle set off on time and headed out to a feeding flock of Gulls just at the edge of the harbour. There were Auks a plenty, but no Skuas. A change of course then took us out towards Flamborough Head, where on the way Miss Cole picked up the first Bonxie which did the decent thing and came straight towards us, passing just a short distance from the boat - nice. Bonxies then began to turn up quite regularly, all giving good views and making the day of a couple of guys with 75 foot long telephoto lenses.

Three miles out past Flamborough Head Sooty Sheawaters started to come inquisitively close to throw up in the chum. These were definitely my all time betestestest views I’ve had of Sooties as they “glided by effortlessly” (probably the most overly used expression, ever, without exception) just a couple of metres from the side of the boat looking all dead nice and cuddly with their soft velvet brown plumage, and then proceeded to throw up in the chum.

A few Manxies were out there, as well as a couple of distant Arctic Skuas, but the star bird was undoubtedly an adult Yellow-legged Gull who’s legs were so so so so yellow that you could even see them under water - the wonders of nature. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know the answer, but it just rocked. Yellow-legged Gulls rock. And I don’t know why. They just do. Apparently this was the first YLG on the Yorkshire Belle.

More erotic encounters with Sooties followed before we headed back to Bridlington for chips and scraps. The log for the day was 9 Sooties, 4 Manxies, ad Yellow-legged Gull, 6 Bonxies, 5 Arctic Skuas and a Little Gull. Not the best haul in history, but a great way to spend a Saturday morning, and I’ll definitely do one or two again next year.

29th September, Chorlton Water Park

Oh dear. Not good at all. Haven’t been birding with a hangover for ages. It’s shit. Had a few too many Babychams last night in the Red Lion. Bad skills. As per usual I only went out with the intention of having just the one.

I used to indulge in birdspotting with a hangover on quite a regular basis, but now my old drinking pals have all grown up and become all respectable and stuff, leaving me behind to wallow in my own vomit by myself. There was this one time (at band camp) when I’d been out in Manchester all night drinking some rancid strawberry lager. This was topped with a ritualistic Monsoon’s chicken tikka kebab, with extra red artificial colouring.

The next morning the mega-alert kicked in on my pager - the Skippool Creek Great Knot had reappeared.

I was still far too pissed to drive, so Miss Cole was appointed as designated driver. I splashed some water over my face and then brushed my teeth. Unfortunately I knocked the back of my throat with the toothbrush and my throat began to constrict as I threw myself over to the toilet bowl and coated the whole toilet and most of the cistern with a fantastic shower of bright red vomit. For some stupid fucking reason, the bathroom in our old place had a cream carpet; who’s stupid fucking idea was that? Despite my best efforts to channel the spew directly into the toilet, splash-back had been impossible to avoid, and the carpet was fucked.

The pager kept saying something about the tide rising and that the bird will fuck off soon if you don’t hurry up and see it, so the carpet was left uncleaned (much to the chagrin of The Cole), as was the specks of vomit splash-back all over my arms and chest (much to the childish amusement of The McKinney).

We made Skippool in just over an hour and ran to the edge of one of the jetties to see the Great Knot in all its glory, and looking just like a tin of macaroons. Then we had to go home. The adrenalin subsided and the hangover kicked in - shit!

I’ll have to tell you at some point about the time I tried to piss in my parents’ wardrobe whilst they were in bed.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Chorlton: 1 Meadow Pipit this morning.

27th September, Chorlton Water Park

Four Chiffchaffs in the car park made me think that there was about to be some mega action going on. They were the only ones I saw. Plenty of Jays though (how come Jays go mental in September? [don’t email me to tell me, I’m not really that bothered]), and if you try and forget where you actually are then Jays look so exotic that it’s possible to pretend that you’re somewhere totally different, like maybe a crack house in Salford. Eleven Tufted Ducks now: let the Aythya-fest commenceth!

26th September, Carmel Head (again)

Oh no, not again. This was becoming like Groundhog Day. Another morning wandering around looking for a Wheatear that was nowhere to be seen. I checked the field where it had allegedly been relocated yesterday afternoon, but I could only find 3 Northern Wheatears and 2 Whinchats. Was it really seen again yesterday afternoon? Really? Or was it just some cruel joke? I checked all the way west to Carmel Head without any luck, but where do you stop? Yep, it could easily be around, but there’s quite a few fields around and there was only me looking this morning!

Bastard Wheatear. Choughs were nice though.

[postscript: just after I got home I read on the pager that the Wheatear had been relocated in the afternoon just a few fields west of where we had been looking. Tits!]

Has anyone ever had a worse seawatch than that? I’ve seen more seabirds in one afternoon in Staffordshire than I did here today. To cheer ourselves up I had some chips (£1 from by Leasowe Lighthouse, and most excellent they happened to be) and then we went to see Mandarins at Rapists Mere, where we further extended the boundaries of bird identification by thinking a Teal was a Mallard. We didn’t see any Mandarins either. And, just to cap the worst day’s birding ever, we finished up at Frodsham where there had to be a good wader lurking somewhere. Afterall, Frodsham was at one time the north of England’s wader Mecca. Remember? This afternoon we saw some Redshank. For the last hour I couldn’t even lift my bins I was so depressed.

I think I might need a new past-time. I was thinking about taking up philanthropy, but I’ve got no money and I despise any form of charity, so it will have to be that other thing that sounds like philanthropy but involves stamps. I think Tom Hanks starred in a film about it. Or was that about spreadable cheese? Wonder if we’ve got any Dairylea in the fridge…

Hi everyone (both of you), did you have a good summer? Do you think I’m bothered if you did or didn’t? If you didn’t have a good summer (not that I care) then I’m sure that the reason was down to Tom McKinney’s 2006 Birding Diary not being updated as regularly as usual. What can I say? I’m really sorry I ruined your summer. From the bottom of my heart I am genuinely sorry, but there were some good reasons:

1) we moved house at the end of June. And guess what? You’re all invited to the house warming party next Saturday night! Unfortunately I can’t tell you where it is, so you’ll just have to guess. But don’t forget to bring a bottle. Oh yeah, and it’s a themed party: Vicars and Tarts. Only this party has a twist: the boys have to dress as tarts and the girls as vicars. Hopefully this will bring about an exciting ecumenical discussion concerning the controversial topic of women vicars, and result in a big fight;

2) BT (the fucking wankers) wouldn’t give us a phone line because they are (and I don’t use this word without good cause) cunts. I hate BT. In fact I hate BT so much that if I ever met Mr BigBTboss himself - and he was like out somewhere, like with his family, you know, like having a picnic - I swear on my life that I would shit in his sandwiches. I would genuinely SHIT-IN-HIS-SANDWICHES. Fuck you BT;

3) we were 800,000 miles away in Peru for most of the summer (‘trip report’ coming soonish);

4) there is no ‘4’ because I think that I more than justified myself in the three previous reasons.

Anyhow, it’s good to back and I’m really looking forward to the autumn. No I’m not, that sentence was a lie. It’s not good to be back and I couldn’t give a pig’s-cock-in-a-barrel-of-shit care about the coming autumn. I wonder what exciting things will happen in the coming months? A couple of Pelicans? A mutant trans-gender Grosbeak in the Home Counties? Oh my God, what’s this now on the pager? Fuck me: possible female Indigo Bunting near Tamworth. Christ on a fish-slice! “Miss Cole, get that petrol tank filled!”

Well even if the birding is bollocks, you’ll be overjoyed to know that there are some new and exciting features coming to skills-bills.co.uk in the near future, the most excting of which is:

Kate Humble’s Weekly Bird News Round Up (now online!!!)

How good is that? Fucking brilliant I’d say - but then again I would say that because I have a foul mouth. Kate (or k8 as she likes to be known amongst the Crips on the streets of Compton, LA) has kindly agreed to exclusively provide readers of skills-bills.co.uk with an enjoyable and authoritative summary of all the week’s exciting bird news. skills-bills.co.uk readers will also be the first to know about any developments in her off-screen relationships with Bill Oddie and Simon King. Pretty exciting stuff, eh?

So sit back, relax and remember that you only live once (unless you died on the operating table and had one of those out-of-body experiences, only to be brought back to life again by them electric shock things they use on the BBC’s flagship medical drama Holby City) so enjoy it, because some of you might be dead soon, and then what will you say?

“Oh, I wish I’d done this and that when I was younger.”

Or maybe you’d say,

“Oh, I wish I’d gone to see that Buff-bellied bastard Pipit on the Tuesday and not waited till the Wednesday.”

Or perhaps some of you might even say,

“Oh, I wish I hadn’t killed all those pensioners,”

but that would probably just be if you were Harold Shipman. And always remember the wise words of Ben Affleck at the end of the epic Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon:

“Bruce Willis, please don’t kill yourself. Let me die instead of you. You need to go back to Earth and look after your daughter Liv Tyler. I don’t deserve to live, Bruce. I’m just a fucking dumb meat-head twat. Whereas you are a caring Hollwood-type with Demi Moore for an ex-wife and Liv Tyler for an on-screen daughter. What point is there in me going back to Earth? And besides, this whole mission - in which we’re supposed to blow up an asteroid by digging an 800m hole in it and then sticking a nuclear missile down there - was doomed to failure from the start. And look: Billy Bob Thornton is a NASA administrator and Steve Buscemi has gone insane.”

So there you have it, from Ben Affleck himself. And his words are worth something because it’s logical to assume - seeing as he was once married to her - that he’s most probably performed at least one act of sexual intercourse with Jennifer Lopez; and how many of us can say we’ve done that? So think on. And don’t smoke pot or listen to heavy metal music, because you’ll end up schizophrenic just like Captain Ahab who thought he was a Sperm Whale.

And finally, if you have time to read any other stuff then these below are officially the best birding reads on the intranet. Everything else is just shit.

Another Place    Aurora Borealis    Bogbumper    Charlie's Bird Blog    Cork Birding    George Bristow's Secret Freezer   

Joe's Birding Blog    Josh Jones's Blog    The Masturbating Ornithologist    Menzie Birding    The Not Very Big Year   

Punkbirder    Vectis Birder    Will Bowell's Ad-Lib