On Birds and Their Tables (and a Bit About Boris.)

Today I finished the job which only got half done yesterday. It’s a new bird table for the front of the house, and now that it’s finished it looks so smart, functional, well made, and pristine that I’m reluctant to put bird feed on it. I want it to stand there, resplendent in its perfection, as a monument to my constructive genius, not messed up by bird droppings. That’s a typical human failing, isn’t it? Ego, pride, vacuous self-satisfaction. Any job worth doing is worth doing well, right? Right. Doing a job well should be taken for granted, and there’s no need for pride because virtue is its own reward. Got it. And yet I still keep looking at it and thinking how smart it looks and taking pointless pride in a job well done. I wonder whether I’ll ever grow up.

I covered it with bird seed and rolled oats anyway, and topped the water bowl up to the brim, and that should be the end of the matter.

But then I saw a female blackbird behaving oddly. She was letting me get too close before flying away, and seemed to have taken quite a penchant to my plastic garden chair. When I went to sit in it myself this evening she merely hopped off and stood a few feet away watching me. Blackbirds don’t usually do that.

She was one of those females which have the usual brown bodies and wings, but a pale chest which shows off the speckles that all females have. She was very pretty and new-looking (like the bird table, whoops) and I decided she was one of this season’s juveniles and would soon learn that two-legged creatures are dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. That’s a shame because making friends with a blackbird would be a nice thing to do (and if the locals got to hear about it they could nod their heads knowingly and my reputation would be even more secure.)

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So should I now make the post in which I compare Boris Johnson’s dishonesty (the Covid issue which is dominating the UK news at the moment) with Tony Blair’s at the time of the Gulf War, and consider whether there’s a little hypocrisy going on here? No, I don’t think so. Dishonesty and hypocrisy are natural features of the world in which senior politicians operate and we all know that, so why bother? My nightly YouTube fix is beckoning and there should be a new Why Files video up today. They’re always a little eye-opening and far more interesting.