Of Birds and Biliousness...

Oh God. Oh bad! Oh woe! Oh no… So much for the internal clock. Rather than waking at 8.30 am, I woke at 5.06 precisely and knew straight away that something was wrong. It wasn’t the lack of ear-splitting blackbird on the branch outside the window. It wasn’t even the crow having a row with the magpies who were tap-dancing on the roof. It was my stomach.

I’d woken from a nightmare in which my brother (in the dream, I haven’t one in real life) had ripped the front door from my flat which, rather improbably, was a council flat in a tower block overlooking the beach. I must have looked at too many of those websites recently showing horrid concrete beach developments in Spain and Bulgaria. With no door, I was invaded by surly hoodies and painted bimbettes who started having a party and stealing everything in sight including (ultimate horror) my mobile phone. Then fire engines rolled up. There was a fire in a higher flat. Scorched people with smoking clothes came whooshing down a thing that was a cross between a bouncy castle and an aeroplane emergency chute, to crash-land on the beach as the chute ended about ten feet from the ground.

It was a classic anxiety dream and I awoke with heart pounding and stomach churning. The heartbeat calmed down but the stomach went on churning, and still does, in ever more bilious heaves, as I write. The cause for my discomfort might just be the fact that, last night, in the space of a couple of hours, I introduced my stomach ulcers to a veggie pasta with roasted pine nuts and lots of cheese, two glasses of red wine, some chocolates, a brandy and a banana, not necessarily in that order. When will I ever learn?

I shall keep trying to set my internal alarm clock though. Perhaps, if it hadn’t been for the ballets being performed on my roof and in my stomach, I might have first seen the light at 8.30, who knows? Oh, and the spot on the end of my nose is worse. It’s getting a head on it. Or should that be, my head is getting a nose on it? Oh Lord. Pass the Prozac.

Talking of birds, if you're an ornithologist, the outer city suburbs is the place to be. As well as the usual suspects, there was a heron on a tree, 22 parakeets on the same one a few days later, a green woodpecker attacking an ant heap three days ago and last summer I saw my first ever spotted flycatcher. Bill Oddie has nothing on me. I used to live near him and Hampstead Heath is a great place for twitchers. I was walking down a woodland path, just off the main road, when a kestrel swooped down and snatched a small rodent almost from under my feet. I was far more scared at the thought of a vole beneath my sole than a 'falco tinnunculus' round my ankles.