Birdwatchingwatching

by Alex Horne

  For a while then, this room became The Doctor’s Sanctum. When Duncton retired the gory magazines were replaced by birdwatching journals, photography guides and binocular brochures. The Amiga was superseded by a chunky PC before which Duncton would sit for hours, obsessively tinkering with his snaps, glancing up now and then at the birds. In many ways it’s become a playroom once more.

  Just a few yards from his window, his mighty bird table, the timeless Large Ashford Bird Table, formed the centre of his private reserve. Strong but elegant, it would have taken up most of my Kensal Green garden. From its six beams hung six bird feeders of varying shapes and sizes, cylindrical peanut dispensers (Avian Bird Feeder Thistles), rectangular fat holders (Suet Selective Squirrel-proof Bird Feeders) and the trademark coconuts (Duncton’s Dangling Coconuts), all swinging temptingly in the breeze. Since Horace, our bird-molesting cat,6 passed away at the end of 2002, Duncton had been able to make this a bird-friendly zone. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an empty bird feeder or a soiled bird bath in Duncton’s garden.

  Within sixty minutes of sitting in his swivelly chair, I had seen no less than sixteen species dining at the table. All my usual north London suspects had appeared, looking decidedly healthier here in the country, alongside several new species for my list. First, a cuddly collared dove almost over-balanced the weighty structure as it tried to prise a peanut from its container. As he banged away at the bars, a diminutive dunnock hopped around beneath. An entirely unimpressive brown bird, which I think I’d mistaken for wrens my entire life. Looking at the book then looking back at the bird again, I tested the word ‘dunnock’ a few times out loud. ‘Dunnock. Dunnock. Dunnock …’ No, I’d never heard of a dunnock. Still, I’d seen one now and that was all that mattered.

  A little later, my maiden coal tit arrived, casually knocking back a seed or two before diving for cover. Two black-headed gulls then landed in the middle of the lawn and chased each other round like albino puppies. I’m always confused by these seabirds. Why are they so often seen away from the sea? Do they not know their own name? I didn’t have the answers.

  Finally, I managed to make out a bullfinch, gnawing away at one of the two coconuts swinging from a tree by the garage. For me, bullfinch is another not entirely fair name, partly because it sounds a tiny bit too close to bullshit for comfort (if you’re sitting in a hide, listening to a fellow birdwatcher witter on, a sudden cry of ‘Bullfinch!’ could easily be misinterpreted) but mainly because they don’t look anything like bulls. They may well be ‘A rather big and very compact finch’ as the Collins explains, but they’re not really bullish enough to justify that comparison. They look to me more like a robin who’s really let himself go – like my Kensal Green one might in a couple of years. The male boasts a plump red stomach, puffed out like a retired rugby player who’s been enjoying the post-match hospitality a bit too often, the female paler and grey, understandably, but equally rotund.

  17 February

  A week later it was time to visit my new parents. For the first time since our wedding the two of us, all four parents, Rachel’s brother and sister and both their partners were all getting together for a weekend in the hotel where our reception had taken place, just south of the border in County Cavan. The trip got off to an excellent start, when the pilot welcomed us on to the plane with the words: ‘Welcome to Easyjet Flight 216, my name is Captain Bird.’7

  I love visiting Ireland. That might sound trite but it’s true. We go to see Rachel’s family every couple of months and I always look forward to the drive from Belfast to County Fermanagh, the hills rolling along beside us, and the roads gradually narrowing down to the final single track that leads to their house. I like the feeling that gently takes over as you head out towards the middle of nowhere. Not that Lisnaskea, the nearest town, is nowhere. It’s definitely somewhere. And it’s quite like Midhurst, just a bit smaller and much harder to spell.

  What I haven’t always loved is working in Ireland. One of the most notoriously tough gigs on the stand-up comedy circuit is the Empire in Belfast where countless comics have come ‘all the way from London’ (as the compères often revel in announcing) to be greeted ‘enthusiastically’ by a packed and well-oiled crowd. Now, I’ve watched several shows here from the point of view of the audience and can safely say that it’s a brilliant night for anyone that side of the stage. There’s nothing nasty about the treatment English comics receive. Let’s just call it thorough. The crowd is simply keen to stress that the comics are not in England now. They’re in Ireland. So they should probably talk about Ireland. Ideally the current political situation in Ireland. But they better be funny too. If these criteria aren’t met, they’re not interested. Jokes about ‘the Tube’ and ‘London’s pigeons’ don’t go down well.

  When I was starting out as a stand-up, I had a couple of tough nights at the Empire. What usually happened was I’d come on, look nervous, the audience would sense that nervousness and grow confident. I’d sense their confidence and grow more nervous. This would go on until both of us reached our elastic limits and I fell silent while they did a bit of shouting. After about ten more minutes I’d admit defeat. People would then come up to me at the bar and say, ‘Well done, mate. You were shit but you did it. I wouldn’t have had the balls. What are you having?’ I’d then have to drink more Guinness than I can handle and try not to embarrass myself for the second time in one night.

  Even trickier was a gig in Bangor, County Down, in 2003. Fresh and full of confidence from my first Edinburgh Festival, I was due to perform my one-hour show about the science of laughter called Making Fish Laugh. Unfortunately for me, everyone at the theatre thought they were simply getting an evening of blokey jokes. When Key and I arrived on the fateful night we were greeted by a sign outside the theatre that read Adult Comedy Night with Alex Horne. Inside, 200 drunken men in suits were laughing loudly. The staff had cleverly managed to save some honk by showing an old, adult, Billy Connolly video instead of employing a warm-up act.

  At exactly 9 p.m., the technician pressed pause on Billy (who remained on screen looking appropriately shocked) and I walked out to deliver my hour-long lecture on the perfect conditions for laughter. Ten minutes later the technician pressed pause once again and we slipped quietly out through a back door.

  Over the years, you gradually learn that dying is just a part of comedy. It’s not the end of the world. You get used to it. If you think you’re never going to die you’re either the best stand-up in the world or far too sensitive for the job. After the ‘Bangor Fiasco’ Key and I locked ourselves in our tiny twin hotel room, ate a dodgy Chinese takeaway and left early the next day before we could make eye contact with anyone who had witnessed the ‘performance’. As soon as we were on our way back to the airport the incident was forgotten.

  But the most challenging performance I’ve given in Ireland was my wedding speech. This time the ‘audience’ was almost too mixed. People of all ages, half from England, half from Ireland, all keen to hear what this ‘comedian’ had to say. Some wanted rude jokes, others had made it clear that rude jokes wouldn’t be tolerated. It was a difficult line to tread.

  Thankfully, and a tiny bit luckily, tread it I did. Back then my father-in-law Terry was a cigar smoker of some repute. He’s since given up but I do like to picture him with a fine Cuban cigar in his hand, much like Duncton and his binoculars. Back in December 2004, the smoking ban was already in place in the forward-thinking Republic of Ireland, well before the UK caught up. Due to our hotel’s otherwise convenient location in the southern counties, this meant Terry would be deprived of his beloved cigars on the day of his youngest daughter’s wedding. I therefore wrote the following letter to Paul Murphy, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the House of Commons, and read it out during my speech:

  17 December 2004

  Dear Paul,

  Happy Christmas. I know you’re probably fairly busy at this festive time of year but I have one very quick question. I’m getting marr
ied to a lovely, pretty girl from Fermanagh on New Year’s Day – two weeks tomorrow! – and we’re having our reception just over the border in Ballyconnell. The thing is, my fiancée’s dad Terry really likes smoking cigars and he’s going to have to go outside in the cold to smoke them on this very special day. Because, as I’m sure you know all too well, you’re not allowed to smoke inside hotels in the Republic of Ireland.

  ‘So how can I help?’ I hear you ask. Well, Paul, I was just wondering if you’d be able to lower the Northern Irish border by just a couple of miles for just a couple of hours on New Year’s Day in two weeks’ time. That way Terry could smoke his cigars to his heart’s content without breaking the law and without getting arrested. It would mean a lot to him and it might just put his new son-in-law in his good books.

  I’d be really grateful if you could let me know as soon as possible as I have to tell him either way in my speech in fifteen days’ time. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. If you do not write back I shall assume it’s a yes.

  Yours sincerely,

  The Groom

  This went down surprisingly well at the wedding. I was congratulated on my cheeky but well-informed reference to Irish politics. I smiled and nodded. To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about anything political. I just thought it might be funny to see what the man said. It hadn’t crossed my mind that the idea of moving the border now so that a man could smoke his cigar on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding, after so many years of fighting about that very same boundary, might be a funny one. I’ve still never cracked the Empire, by the way.

  So it was with happy memories that we were to revisit the hotel. But before my parents arrived, Rachel and I spent a night at her parents’ stunning house on the shore of Lough Erne. It’s quite like Midhurst’s South Pond, just a hundred times bigger and you can jet-ski on it. When Rachel and I first got to know each other she told me she loved living near water. I told her I did too. It turned out I’d exaggerated my ‘water’ and she hadn’t. And when I say ‘exaggerated’, I think I probably mean ‘lied about’. There’s a fine line between embellishment and dishonesty, whose whereabouts I would learn more about as the year progressed.

  Settling down for a welcoming cup of coffee in the kitchen, my eyes were drawn to the window and a splendid-looking bird feeder on the balcony. It had always been there, I was told, but I’d never noticed it.8 In fact, I could barely see the bird feeder beneath the crawling mass of frenzied birds clinging to its bars. Oblivious to the parallel activity going on in the kitchen (we had biscuits with our coffee), all sorts of gaudy birds were buzzing round the nuts, flapping and squawking like market traders in the morning.

  The scandalous news that I was now ‘doing birdwatching’ had, of course, reached Lisnaskea, so when asked to identify these individual species I was relieved to be able to confidently point out blue tits, great tits and coal tits. A couple of the other birds I glossed over. These were slightly bigger, even more colourful, like classy canaries, gold, green, red and yellow – again, I couldn’t understand why I’d never paid them any attention before. But after a good few minutes staring I thought I’d worked it out and returned my verdict to the jury. ‘What you have there,’ I said, as formally as is appropriate in such a situation, ‘are greenfinches, goldfinches and – I don’t say this lightly – a siskin.’

  Thus, very early in my first birdwatching year for two decades, I’d laid my reputation on the line. Duncton was to arrive the next day and would either confirm or reject my opinion in an instant – for him, of course, the shape and faces of these common birds are as ingrained as mine, Mat and Chip’s. But I was almost certain I was right. The greenfinch – a greenish bird, with bright yellow splashes and the tell-tale stout beak of the finch shaped to maximise nut-cracking potential; the goldfinch – a goldish bird, mostly white and brown with yellow sparks, jet-black wings and a bizarre red face holding a similar but slightly slimmer beak; and then, of course, this alleged siskin. Yearning as I had for a sighting of this bird since I’d embedded the Defender II back in Kensal Green, I was now so familiar with its picture in the guide it was quite an odd sensation to see it in real life, rather like setting eyes on a famous person in the flesh after gazing at their face in the tabloids every day for a month. At first I couldn’t quite make sense of what I was seeing. It was only when I stopped and stared that it sunk in. That’s not what I think it is, is it? I thought. Yes, I think it is, I thought. Well, well, I thought. I had convinced myself at least.

  Of course no one in Rachel’s family had any reason to doubt my conclusion. Why would they? They had every faith in their young birdwatching son-in-law, for which I was, as always, grateful, and I liked to think that Rachel was even a little bit proud of her newly knowledgeable husband. But the next day, when Duncton did indeed confirm that this was a siskin (‘Yes, they’re siskins, they particularly like the nuts in red bags, people think they remind them of pinecones. They’re winter visiting finches from Northern Scandinavia.’), I was nearly overwhelmed with relief and satisfaction. I was definitely whelmed. I felt proud of myself. I felt like I’d passed another test. I was on my way.

  Later, walking around the hotel’s golf course, I correctly pinpointed cormorants and Canada geese on a water hazard and a bunch of long-tailed tits that darted along the branches beside us. I was on a roll. Duncton taught me how to tell the jackdaws from the rooks in the trees above us (‘The rooks have a lot of white on their beaks and are a bit bigger, and they’ve got really evil-looking white rings around their eyes, like little gangsters.’). Even Rachel got in on the act, pointing out a pair of ‘wee willie wagtails’ on the grass by the carpark. These mini magpies are a funny sort of bird. Once you’ve seen one you’ll notice them everywhere.9

  Back at Belfast Airport at the end of a triumphant weekend (Liverpool had knocked Man Utd out of the FA Cup on Saturday, really sealing the deal on the cherry on the icing on the cake), a typically dry security officer couldn’t help but comment on my birdwatching equipment. Carefully swabbing my binoculars for traces of something treacherous, he looked me in the eye and said, ‘Been over here looking at our birds have you? Seen any nice tits?’

  ‘Well, sort of, something like that,’ I stuttered, still unable to cope with a Belfast heckle.

  20 February

  Confidence, in bird terms, at an all time high, I decided to explore the Kensal Green that lay beyond our constricting garden walls. Between the canal and the first row of houses lies Kensal Green Cemetery, one of the best graveyards in London. I don’t think cemeteries are actually rated in top ten terms, but Kensal Green is the oldest of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ nineteenth-century graveyards still in operation, and the only one with an Act of Parliament that prevents its bodies being disturbed or the land itself being sold for development. This means that large areas have grown over into sprawling wilderness, and you can walk for hours between the crumbling obelisks and mausoleums. Among the 500 people listed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography who are buried here are Marigold Frances Churchill, daughter of Sir Winston, Princess Sophia, the mathematician Charles Babbage, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the writers William Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope.

  When I’m working on comedy material I like to say it out loud, preferably while pacing around. Because our garden wasn’t more than five or six strides long, and not wanting to look too much like a nutter on the streets surrounding our home, I would often retreat to the cemetery and wander aimlessly and noisily for hours, in the hope of squeezing a joke out of something I’d noticed that day. I can imagine that the sight of me, roaming up and down the aisles (aisles? Sounds rather supermarketty), talking to myself and occasionally chuckling may well have been an alarming one. But throw binoculars into that mix and you’ve got a genuine and potentially dangerous eccentric on the loose. Luckily there was rarely anyone else there (except for the 250,000 souls tucked away in their earthy beds) so for the rest of the month, indeed for the rest of t
he year, I made regular trips to the cemetery, clocking up what must have been an enormous graveside mileage as the shrubs blossomed then shrunk back around me and the graves sank further into the earth.

  On my first such trip of my Big Year, I brought along a list of birds I hoped to spot and a list of the top twenty graves I thought I might also stumble across. I wondered which would be harder to locate. Unfortunately it was freezing cold and my fingers couldn’t turn pages or hold binoculars steady, so after finding my first song thrush and the grave of Ernest Augustus, son of King George III, I gave up. Trying to find twenty gravestones in a sea of 250,000 was never going to be easy. That’s the equivalent of six full Anfields pouring out on to the street and me wandering amongst them trying to spot someone I recognise – while shivering a lot.

  Steadily, though, as the year marched on, I grew to know the limitless alleyways (better than aisles? Maybe, but a little too seedy), and the birds and graves they accommodated. The parakeets tended to flock in the western section, near the Anglican Chapel, robins often guarded the triumphal Entrance Gateway and magpies liked to stand symbolically along the Central Avenue. As far as I know I’m the only person who has ever ‘birded’ the graveyard. That was probably my main patch for the year. I never saw anything particularly out of the ordinary, but I loved searching for life amongst the death. It was, to me, the most peaceful place in London.