What a week - and yellowhammers

It has been such a crap week. I'm now with a sorethroat again. I now take painkillers for my sorethroats because i can't be fecked having to live with the pain. The sorethroat i don't know where it comes from. Ghin coughed most of this week. Peter had the flu again and Oisin was off school for a day because of a dodgy tummy. I have never been so frequently slightly ill.

The upshot of this has been that i've been unable to turn up to the blog. Ghin was crying and crying for most of night over the past three nights. Everytime i tried leaving, he would cry. Last night Peter put a jumper on him and that seems to have done the trick. He didn't have a big coughing spells and we both slept like babies.

I must say that it is taking such a long time to settle down. This year seems to be all over the place. On a wider level, the economic recession seems to increase daily. Dire warnings and talks of it being bigger than the 1930s recession are being muttered about. On the one level, i could well believe it. Bankers have certainly been behaving like robber barons, although there has been a very small segment of ethical investment going on. On the other hand, the 1930s??? That was when people were jumping out of windows. It precipitated WWII. The time of the Great Depression makes you think of Steinbeck and the Grapes of Wrath and people being carted enmasse with their belongings to nowhere. Unless the government is telling us that it is utterly unable to help us...

Are they really saying that it is going back to those terrible times? Or have people once again completely lost the senses of proportion?

So we are waiting for the storm to hit. This terrible recession which is bigger than the 1930s recession.

Sometimes we talk ourselves into these things. Sometimes we choose to hear the doom mongers.

There is still snow around. Snow in small pockets. Yesterday we were standing in a field of hammered corn. A mix known as wildbird cover. A mix of cereal like quinoa, kale, oats, etc. It had been grown for the seed eating birds like yellowhammer, linnets, tree sparrows. (It's hard to switch from RSPB mode to normal mode.) There i stood witbh 30 people from various parts of Comber. Farmers, some children, officials from the Department of Agriculture, the Environment Agency. Retired types and journalists. It had just stopped raining and thankfully the wind wasn't too cold. OK, Ghin has woken up again. Great.

No he has gone back to sleep.

Anyway, in this field it was cold, but beautiful. Out in the country, taken out of my usual space, i felt alive again. The yellowhammers were out. I saw my first ones. They sat on the hawthorns, little fluffed out bright yellow puffs. I couldn't believe how yellow they were. I was really incredibly excited, but i didn't show it. They're amazing, i thought to myself. I would have squeaked a bit in the past and then i thought, maybe i'm all grown up now. I told Claire and she squeaked for me. Oh wow! i'm so excited, i can't believe it's your first yellowhammer! She squealed.

Peter laughs at the work that we do. Saving birds, he sneers. Oh yes the world is having a recession and you stand in a field looking at birds. Don't you have more important things to do. That is an important thing i think. There's nothing more important that looking after the birds, is there. Not to the cost of everything else, but they share the world with us. If more people looked after the birds, and spent less time doing 'important' things, we would be in a much better place. If more people chopped wood, drew water and listened to birdsong, we would be happier, less polluted, filled with dignity, connected to the places around us. We wouldn't be the atomised, thought-filled, abstract, exploiting shits that we are today.

And that's why i work with the RSPB, because although they can be the atomised, thought-filled, abstract, exploiting shits occassionally, as we all can be, by and large they do meaningful and beautiful work. And forget the fecking science, as the years have gone by i don't give a stuff about the science anymore. It simply is a means to an end. And the end is, seeing the delight in a farmer's face when he sees his hedges covered in linnets or yellowhammers, seeing a child get excited about a blue tit or blackbird, talking to an old timer about the corncrake and barn owls. The work we do gives people the space to be gentle, the space to become children again, the space to detach from the distractions and become immersed in the real. To enter a wilderness of wonder. That is why i work with the RSPB. The science they can keep - i do it for the poetry. I do it for the pleasure. I do it for the birds.