So that was 2006, I mean 2005, or whatever
year it was. All in all it wasn't too bad. It started with
my dedicated attempt at a Manchester year list, only to
crumble pathetically just seven weeks into the year (I blame
the local water); and it ended with a big kick in the nuts
at the tail end of the year as I missed good bird after good
through through medical incarceration for a thigh hernia
(not really of course). The middle bit of my year was
dominated by getting married to a woman, which some people
seemed to be incredibly surprised about . Whatever year next
year is, it looks promising: the long range forecast shouts
"el supremo!" and I think that's good... I
think.
Christmas was excellent, and I was probably
given the best Christmas presents I've ever had, which was a
shame seeing as I bought everyone a pile of cheap worthless
tat, most of which is no doubt now floating about on eBay.
My main Chrimbo pressie was a bike (a proper one with wheels
and gears and everything), six big posh expensive bird books
(none of which I understand) and a great big cock shoved
right up my...
To be honest, my Christmas was made complete
when I received a text from Jason Atkinson saying 350!
For those of you that follow the Surfbirds year listing
things, you'll know that Jason was stuck firmly on 349 for
quite a while, and it looked like he was going to fall one
short of the mega 350 for the year. Then a Richard's Pipit
was sent from Heaven just three days from the final day and
Jason finished the year on a fantastic 350 alongside
fellow year-listing nutter Malc Curtin - though he did have
to travel a total of 1,100 miles in two days to see the
Pipit (he missed one in Aberdeen and then finally scored
with another in Norfolk). So a massive well done to both
Jason and Malcolm - as a reward I suggest they both check
themselves into a brain clinic for examination :-)
Anyway, this bike... well it's
great. I can go all over the place - providing it's not
uphill cuz that's just too hard - and whilst cycling the
length of the Longdendale Valley I was already picking up
extreme rarities that I otherwise would have driven straight
past, such as 300 Pinkfeet flying over north, a bonny wee
Little Owl on a wall, 40+ Siskin and small parties of
Bullfinches all over the place. Cycling is the way forward -
I can't believe all of you wankers that drive all over the
place and have no regard or respect or consideration for the
environment and so forth...
So, like I said, that was 2004, it wasn't
too bad. But now it's time to say goodbye as we head up
north to cold, windy, wet Islay, to start another new year
watching geese and drinking whisky. Be sure to check back
soon for more thrills, spills, window sills and sycophantic
Margaret Thatcher worship on the number one Google site for
mindless swearing.
Happy New Year!
I'll probably not be online again now before
the 25th, so I demand that every single regular reader of
Tom McKinney's Birding Diary has a great Christmas. I mean
it, I order you to have a fucking brilliant Christmas, and
if you don't have a brilliant Christmas then I'll find out
where you live and post dog shit through your letter boxes,
which would be really spiteful seeing as you'd just had a
bad Christmas anyway - kind of like rubbing lemon juice into
a paper cut on your bell-end, so think on. I'd especially
like to wish a shit-hot brilliant Christmas to all of the
kind-hearted people who have sent me nice emails or wrote
nice things in my guestbook throughout the year - it's much
appreciated, but I'd prefer money in future; or if you're a
wazzo bird with a cracking pair of jugs, then a nudey photo
would be even nicer, thanks. And of course, I can't forget
all the great people who so kindly link this nonsense that I
write from their own blogs and websites, all of whom I hope
I've returned the favour to by sticking them in the links
column on the left - go read them, they're far better than
this bollocks.
As for you irregular readers, or
just the ones who have perhaps stumbled across this website
by accident having typed mindless swearing into
Google, then you can all go fuck yourselves.
Also, if I don't get chance to upload some
more shit before the new year, then
Happy
New
Year
as well.
To ease the terror and hell that is a 21st
century Christmas (admit it, it's fucking wank!), there's a
load of crap below about rubbish things I've done in the
last week - it's all crap. But first, here is my festive
Christmas top five YouTube bollocks video clips - isn't the
internet shit? Yes.
Happy holidays!
***
Remember when TV was good at
Christmas? Remember the Christmas Day blockbuster? Remember
the days before Rupert Murdoch took over the world and
started pouring televisual shit down our throats, and then
breaking up all the shit with adverts for insurance
companies showing big fat-arsed lazy trouts slipping on
polished floors and winning £10,000 in a no win no fee
law suit against a small business that will probably
bankrupt them? Remember those days before all of that? No,
neither do I. Anyway, Christmas Day 1988, do you remember
the big movie? I do, it was Ghostbusters, the best movie of
all time with the best theme tune song thing. Sadly the
promotional video hasn't dated all that well... Jesus!
Every now and then something hits you that
changes your life forever. For me it happened in 1999. I was
lost, dazed and confused, largely because I was always
pissed. And then I found salvation. This great country of
ours has produced some of the greatest musicians of all
time: Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, IRON fucking
MAIDEN, Iron Maiden, IRON MAIDEN, Spandau Ballet,
Wham, 911 and many, many, many more... but how many of them
can claim to have summarised the plight of modern society in
just one song? Sinners drop to your knees and be cleansed by
the great Sir Harry Cliff Richard Webb, the greatest man
ever:
If you can get through the whole
of this next song without shitting yourself inside-out twice
and vomiting your own kidneys, then you deserve a pat on the
back. You want to know everything that's bad about
Christmas? Well here it is compressed into a five minute
bile-spouting cock-spurting blood-bath bastardised shower of
piss:
Amongst the billions of dick-shit talentless
bastards of the world, there is the occasional bit of
brilliance, for example guitarist Andy McKee. Short, fat,
bald and bearded, he's probably never going to get to be on
Letterman or shag Abi Titmuss, but he can surely be consoled
by the fact that he plays guitar like a bastard, and I mean
a good bastard, a brilliant bastard. Witness his seriously
mean Drifting - and before you speculate that it's
some sort of hoax trick, fuck you all, because I've seen him
do it live:
And finally, as compensation to all those of
you who have been disappointed by how little Iron Maiden
have featured this year, here is a taster of what's to come
in 2008. If you don't already know, 2008 is the biggest Iron
Maiden year ever, with the long awaited release in February
of the DVD version of the greatest ever live concert ever:
Live After Death from1985. Excited? Well you fucking
well should be. And if that's not enough, Maiden are also
doing their one and only UK stadium gig at Twickenham in
July - and guess what? I've got a ticket!!!
Westport Lake in Stoke-on-Trent was the place where I did my
first ever bit of birdspotting. It was March 1989, and for a
birthday present I'd been joined up to the Young
Ornithologists Club (now known as the Super Adventure
Discovery Nature Wildlife and Animals Explorers Phoenix
Society, or something equally as shit as that) as a
birthday present. It was rubbish. For a start the leader was
a total fucking twat who once told me off for twitching a
Temminck's Stint, his opinion being that a twitcher was only
one rung of the ladder higher up than a lobster. Arsehole.
The first bird I ever saw through a pair of binoculars was a
beautiful Great Crested Grebe at Westport Lake. At that
point I realised that one of two things was happening here:
either I was one of those geek weirdo kids who did crazy
stuff like read books, had 'pen pals', didn't enjoy playing
Sega Megadrive and never sniffed glue; or perhaps birds
were, in fact, sooper-dooper cool and it was everyone else
that was in the wrong. Sadly it transpired that it was the
former, and I soon came to understand that birds certainly
were not sooper-dooper cool, and that I was just a nerd
poindexter.
After taking an interest in birds, all of my other abilities
and positive attributes rapidly began to diminish - I could
no longer play football (soccer); I was afraid of catching a
cricket ball; I started feeling guilty about shouting abuse
at tramps; I would listen to Mendelssohn over MC Hammer; I
began to admire the conservative casual fashion sense of Ian
McShane in Lovejoy; and I even started painting Warhammer
figures and fantasising that I was a Space Marine. I blame
all of this on that Great Crested Grebe at Westport Lake.
There's a lot written about the lack of children interested
in birds nowadays, and a fear that a pampered upbringing in
sterile unnatural environments is leading to a complete
disconnection between children and the natural world.
Indeed, bookshops are this Christmas filled with old
fashioned books for kids that encourage them to dig up
worms, play with spiders, roll down grass banks and make
daisy chains. However, doing these things will only lead to
your child being labelled a big gayer when he/she
returns to school.
Just imagine this: your son goes back to school after
Christmas and tells his friends about how he, his older
sister and his mum and dad went out into the cold and had
snowball fights, and made snow angels, and dug up worms and
fed the birds - they had a really great time as a family.
Only then all of his friends will explain how they spent
their Christmas playing Guitar Hero 3 on their new
PS3, consumed nothing but chocolate and Sunny Delight for
two weeks, and no longer want anything to do with your weird
son who also didn't even get a Doctor Who Dalek Sec
Hybrid Voice FX Mask.
So before you go trying to get kids interested in birds and
wildlife, think on, because they might end up like you.
Westport was absolutely freezing today, and much of it
covered in a thick fog. The only birds not shrouded in
freezing murk were some Mallards:
Out in the white shite there were a couple
of striking drake Goldeneyes and a handful of Pochard, but
then I saw the Grebe I mentioned above (more than likely not
the same bird, seeing as that was 18 years ago, but just
play along with me), the little bastard smirking to himself
at having ruined my life. If it hadn't been for birding then
I'd have been a billionaire secret agent with my own private
Caribbean island by now, and certainly not wasting my time
writing this shower of shit week in, week out.
Guess what, I've got a new scope. Nice. I'm not going to
tell you what it is as I don't believe in the promotion of
capitalism (fight the power!), but let's just say that it
might be Austrian, and it might be made by a company that
also makes glassware... but I'll not say another word.
Anyhow, I thought I'd put it through it paces with a serious
test drive up at Monks Road photographing sheep. I think
you'll be impressed:
There's got to be a good caption for this,
but I can't think of one
Ah Christmas shopping, is there anything
quite as wonderful? Probably. But I can't think of anything.
Christmas shopping in Manchester is actually alright, and at
least you get to eat over-priced big sausages and drink
over-priced wine laced with cinnamon at one of the Christmas
markets. And if you time your visit right, you can even
watch hundreds of Pied Wagtails come to roost in the lit
trees in St.Ann's square. Tonight I counted 580 between
1610-1620 (24 hour clock, not a trip back in a time
machine), but I'd say that I missed - at the very least -
another hundred which were coming in from the other side.
I just think I should mention that
as I write this I'm watching Roger Moore in The Spy Who
Loved Me, and he's just shot the baddy Stromberg in the
nuts twice - shot him in the nuts twice, what a bastard!
Anyhow...
Well it started great, I got out of the car
and saw something a little bit weird flying low over: hmm,
weird. And then it spoke: shrrrkr, or
chrrreet as the Collins Guide to European Birdspotting
transcribes it (there's is better than mine), and of course
it was a Dunlin, of course. Dunlin breed up on the moors in
good numbers but this one is about 3 months too early, the
daft twat. Down in Gnat Hole there were tit flocks aplenty,
but hopes of pulling out a Lesser Spotted Pecker amongst
them were dashed by the fact that there wasn't one. Red
Grouse were out and about on the nearby moor, obviously
spooked by the two ominous silhouettes on the horizon
carrying shot guns... *cough cough...
cunts... cough cough*
Everywhere looks nice with a bit
of frost on the ground, even this place:
I was interested to see what some of my
associates in the art world would make of a scene as
quintessentially wintery as the one above, so here's a
depiction by my lunatic suicidal stepfather Vinny van Gogh:
My good mate Pete Mondrian from
the Gamesley council estate, told me that he intended to
convey the scene in the most simple manner possible, and
also that he couldn't really be bothered to put much effort
in:
My dear pals the crazy turd photographers
Gilbert and George, produced this deliberately wacky effort:
And my regular dinner party guest
the Queen of Britart Tracy Emin, turned the beautiful
landscape into a moving pictorial essay concerning love and
intimate relationships:
P.S. Bond's nemesis Jaws, played
by Richard Kiel, has just killed a shark with his big metal
teeth, and now Bond gets to have a feel up of Russian agent
Triple-X's massive knockers - what a bastard!
The Dippers are singing now which
is very, very, very nice indeed. Very nice. I hope to get
some photos of the little beauties soon, but it's so cold at
the moment that if I dared to sit still for more than a
minute then I fear that I may never get up again and then
die, which is a pretty morbid prospect, I'm sure you'll
agree. No Goosanders on the Mossy Lea pond but a Cormorant
was massacring the remaining fish left in there. And did you
know that Cormorants should actually be called Corvorants
after corvids after their olde Englishe naeme of Water Crow?
Neither did I, I just made up. Or did I? I don't know.
Sinister sheep
The sheep keep giving me funny looks, as if they suspect me
of lamb abduction, and I'm getting a bit freaked out by them
now. There's usually one stood in front of the second
five-bar gate with a big beard and a massive staff,
shouting:
You will not pass. You will not pass.
You will not pass!
Depressed horse
I really felt for this horse, so I've named
him Fun Bags to try and cheer him up. It hasn't worked. He
is by far the most depressed horse in north Derbyshire,
possibly even England, though I distinctly remember meeting
the most depressed horse I've ever come across on a trip to
St.David's in Wales, so Fun Bags definitely can't claim the
prize of Britain's most depressed horse. If you know of any
depressed horses then please get in touch. Perhaps I should
sing this to him:
9th December,
The Meinertzhagen Mystery by Brian Garfield (a book
all about telling big fibs)
Let's face it, actual birding
entails leaving the house and getting all cold and wet,
whereas reading about birds can be done from the comfort of
your own home in front of Jeremy Kyle with a nice big bottle
of Frosty Jack cider - far more fun. But reading about birds
is nowhere near as much fun as is reading about Colonel
Richard Meinertzhagen: soldier, sailor, compulsive liar.
Dr Collinson wrote a neat bit about the mad
colonel last year, and you should have a read of it, go on,
read it...
But this book doesn't seem to be on the
birding radar (I aint seen it reviewed in any birdy
magazines, though that could be because I don't read any of
them?), yet it's meticulously well researched and a great
read. Anyone interested in the bird naughtiness of
Meinertzhagen should get hold of it, because although
there's only one chapter dedicated to his bird frauds,
there's tons of other snippets throughout concerning his
other bird exploits and ornithological insanity (laugh at
how he was constantly threatened with being barred from the
British Museum of Natural History for repeatedly getting
caught stealing skins), and it's a cheap book to boot!
Gems include Meinertzhagen's opinion of his Indian 'friend'
the great ornithologist and conservationist Salim Ali:
"...the British Government have no intention of handing
over millions of uneducated Indians to the mercy of such men
as Salim: ...no Englishman would tolerate men being governed
by rats."
and his opinion of women:
"...there were three kinds of women - those who were
satisfied to be married, those who had to be seduced, and
the third kind for whom nothing would do except rape."
Yet everyone he belittled and treated like the lower class
filth that they were seemed to love him all the more
for it anyway - he was a caustic misanthropic loveable
rogue, the Peter Cook of his time. And it's a testament to
his bizarrely contradictory nature that he championed the
state of Israel whilst also being a member of the British
Nazi party.
But here Brian Garfield sets out to prove that not only his
ornithology, but pretty much all of Meinertzhagen's
documented life as we know it was a total lie, with much of
it fabricated in his volumes of diaries. The great legends
that surrounded him sadly never happened, and Garfield
provides ample proof: he never once met Hitler; he had
nothing to do with the famous 'haversack ruse' (which didn't
even work anyway); and he probably didn't even have the
wickedly cruel childhood that he alleged was responsible for
moulding him into such a warped adult. In short he was a
compulsive liar, and Garfield eventually makes a brief
psychological analysis, genuinely suggesting that the
Colonel could well have spent his whole life suffering from
a narcissistic mental disorder.
Perhaps the greatest and darkest
Meinertzhagen mystery is unfortunately not quite possible to
fully solve either way, yet although he refrains from coming
out and saying it directly, Garfield pretty much reckons
that based on the overwhelming circumstantial evidence and
probability, big Dicky did shoot his second wife in the head
as she was not at all happy about his hobby of committing
ornithological fraud - now that's a committed
scientist.
If you love the romanticised tales of Meinertzhagen then I
wouldn't read it, you'll be crushed! But for me it's made
him an altogether considerably more fascinating character,
albeit one who couldn't prevent himself from telling the odd
porky pie or two... or ten thousand.
Shit. I really can't say fairer than that.
Total shit. One Canada Goose, 36 Black-headed Gulls and
absolutely fuck all else, and it slashed it down with rain
as well. Utter shit.
No wonder it's more interesting
finding plane wrecks around here than birds:
Bad sheep! The bastards have been
chewing at my Little Owl tree, well, not my Little
Owl tree but the Little Owl's Little Owl tree, and as a
result there was no sign of the Little Owl that is usually
in the tree that was being eaten by the sheep. Naughty
sheep, they received quite a bleating from me, I can tell
you.
Two Dippers were going mental, as
were two Treecreepers, and the risibly feeble looking tiny
fishing pool by Mossy Lea Farm today had two Tufted Ducks
and two redhead Goosanders on it - now that's magic!
Off with her tail
between her legs after a ticking off from your dear author.
Let's hope she learns her lesson
I must apologise for not having been as
regular with updating my pointless birding diary as I used
to be, only I've been so busy that I've barely even had time
to shit, and the free time I've had has all been spent
eating big sausages and getting smashed on Bavarian lager at
the brilliant Manchester Christmas market, which this year
has a giant model of Zippy - from 70s-80s kids TV programme
Rainbow - dressed as Santa. And I'm not joking
either. But I promise that things will now be back to
normal, whatever normal means.
November to February is a real nut
kicker for birding in the northern hemisphere, what with the
Sun being such a complete cunt and fucking off below the
horizon far too early every day. As Oscar Wilde once said:
winter in the northern hemisphere is the curse of the
birding classes, or some bollocks like that, he was a
prick anyway. His plays are shit - no fighting, no shagging,
no bestiality - I mean come on, what's the point then? And
his jokes don't make any sense either, "a handbag?"
being his most famous joke ever. Well where's the punch-line
in that then? Twat.
So now I'll be updating more regularly
(everyday - yeah right!), and seeing as I don't have time to
go out birding, I'll instead be writing about my new hobby
of collecting car hub caps from roadsides, and my other new
hobby of sleeping with prostitutes.
