Meet Occupy London

Not really! Hah! Just trying to wind [some of] you up! Can you imagine? Me, scum-of-the-earth dangerously intolerant right-wing fascist Osborne love-child nasty unpleasant financial worker bastard and single-handed perpetrator of massive social and economic injustice, publicly airing anything at all on people who feel so strongly about capitalism that they are prepared to live in a tent on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral for months in order to make their point? Oh, except most of them go home at night. No no, it would be very very wrong of me to say anything at all on this [my] blog about anything that might be remotely controversial or have a whiff of soapbox about it. So I shan’t. And those of you whose comments were no doubt ready-formed the moment you saw the title of this post, well, perhaps you have something to say about birds?

No? Funny that. Not to worry though, I do. Lots. In fact that’s what I write about most of the time. Parakeets, Pigeons, Ducks, Woodpeckers, Wheatears, Skylarks, Sandpipers, Yellowthroats, Northern Waterthrushes, Blue-cheeked Bee-eaters, Fea’s Petrels... Nice and safe, birds.  Guaranteed not to raise aaany hackles. I was a bit busy yesterday, so didn’t see any - this is the trouble with trying to write a bird blog. Of course I could just write nothing..... Aaaanyway, today the plan was to rectify that, but once again it didn’t happen. Actually I tell a lie – I left on the school run a little bit early so I could check the Basin on the way. Virtually nothing. And almost unbelievably it soon became less than virtually nothing as man was walking his dog across one of the fairways closest to the water and a bunch of them flew off. Is nothing sacred?! Pfffffffff.

Talking of dogs, I recently discovered that one of my Twitter acolytes is a beagle. No, really. Well, not actually really, obviously, but really enough in the same sense that a cat that wandered onto the pitch at Anfield a couple of weeks ago is also a Twitter user..... Yes, people with mouth-watering amounts of spare time are pretending to be animals on Twitter - and some say that Twitter is a complete waste of time. Honestly. I haven’t been through the whole list to discover if any of the others are animals, but assuming the rest are human, if you take me as a proxy - with approximately one third of a percent of my followers being dogs, and Twitter as a whole having half a billion users - that means that there are 1.6 million people pretending to be dogs online. If that isn’t a tragic statistic, I don’t know what is. Three thousand dogs set up new accounts every day, and Lady Gaga, Twitter's most-followed person, has over 60,000 canine chums – which goes a long way to explaining that meat dress she wore last year. It wasn’t a statement designed to provoke outrage, comment and discussion; no, it was simply for her adoring fans.

Woof woof!