Birding Braunie

I don’t really do birding holidays or treks or whatever they’re called because I have to spend my money on a normal holiday. My wife usually has all the ideas and I”m cool with this. If I was ever to buck this trend and blurt out Trinidad & Tobago for instance, she would eye me suspiciously and accuse me of picking a birdwatching hotspot and, well, she’d be on the money. So I leave it to her. It actually doesn’t matter where in the world we go because wherever it is, it will have birds and more to the point, birds I haven’t seen...and if I’m really lucky, birds I haven’t a clue about. New England. Unlucky. It’s good but not exactly South Africa (next year hopefully) I love America though and this wasn’t a bird trek so I couldn’t expect much. More than that, it was a coach tour so I didn’t even have the luxury of slamming on the brakes and running through the undergrowth to spot a fly by. We were going to whale watch so I had a plan there. Screw the whales – but not literally ...

Electricity is a marvellous thing. It can give you power, heat, light and if you’re stupid, it can kill you. And I’ve always got on with the sparky stuff even on the odd occasion I’ve been stupid. And then there’s my car. My Peugeot is an electrical engineering feat of ineptitude. The lightbulbs can’t be reached, the electric pump for the screen washer reservoir can’t be got at easily; you basically have to dismantle the car to be left with it. The car had actually been in a 'good' garage the day before to have a new pump fitted which is why I know how hard it is to sort. And when the battery goes flat, the lights still work. In my case and just as my brother had carted all of his stuff from his car to mine it waited until we were ready for weekend of blistering birding to say fuck you. My brother is a hero. He wasn’t expecting to have to drive all over North Norfolk with me pointing at all the pubs we could go to when the weather turns but he did and he was awesome (rarely d...