by Alex Horne
By now I’d made several trips to Hampstead Heath and had covered pretty much all of its 800 acres without once bumping into Bill. Statistically this wasn’t surprising. There will always be only one Bill Oddie (despite evidence to the contrary on MySpace) and there was only one of me. In contrast, there are hundreds of great spotted woodpeckers on the heath alone, none of whom have other commitments like making nature programmes or occasionally appearing on comedy shows. So, by dropping in to a place I knew he would definitely be, I figured I’d save myself an awful lot of time in the long run. I was twitching Bill Oddie.
Mum’s instructions were vague (‘Well, it just said the farm was in or near the town …’) and after pulling up at quite a few farms that seemed to concentrate more on making food than TV, I started to worry. I couldn’t dip Oddie again. Then, rounding a corner, I saw the tell-tale telly signs of a man with a yellow high-visibility jacket and earpiece next to an enormous sign saying BBC OB (standing for ‘outside broadcast’, not ‘Oddie Bill’ I later found out).
I suddenly felt quite shifty – as if I actually was a member of the paparazzi – and so instead of stopping and asking after the programme’s presenter, I drove straight past the entrance, pulling up in a layby a few hundred yards down the road. ‘Come on Alex,’ I said to myself in the rear-view mirror. ‘Everything’s OK. You’re a good person, you’re not a stalker.’
These stern words did the trick, and I managed to pull myself together sufficiently to drive back, doing my best to look as normal and non-threatening as possible. I pulled up to the entrance of the farm. The security guard sidled over.
‘Hello,’ I said cheerily.
‘Hello,’ he replied, cleverly throwing the ball right back in my court.
‘Is this where they’re filming Springwatch?’ I asked, with wonderfully feigned ignorance.
‘Yes it is,’ said the man.
‘Is Bill here?’ I probed, sounding just a bit too familiar.
‘Yes he is.’
‘OK. Can I come in and just, you know, have a look at him?’
‘No you can’t,’ he said, firm and surly all of a sudden. ‘That’s not possible. Health and safety. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said, trying to sound jovial through clenched teeth. I drove off, seething.
Health and safety? I wasn’t going to infect Bill with anything! Nor was I going to put him in any sort of danger! All I wanted to do was watch him watching birds. Did Bill attract so many stalkers that he had to have a full-time security team? Or, more likely, was this just standard practice?
Either way, I was put out. But I wouldn’t give up yet. I drove further on down the road and pulled over again. I’d seen a few episodes of Springwatch and knew the set up. Yes, they were camped on a farm, but most of the filming was done outside (that is the best place to watch spring after all). Surely I’d be able to find another way on to the set? Surely there wasn’t a man with a highvis jacket and a huge sense of his own importance at every entrance?
I got out of the car and tiptoed off through the nearest field. I was off-roading. Now I actually was going to do something wrong.
But no. I was denied again. Despite my best trespassing efforts I made absolutely no incursions into the farm. Staggering about aimlessly for an hour, I spotted four Jurassic-like buzzards circling above me, but absolutely no way into the Springwatch camp. Every direction I chose I came up against a high barbed-wire fence or water. I just wasn’t prepared to get scratched or wet. I was also keen not to lose my car and so didn’t want to wander too far off-piste. Eventually I gave up, shouted, ‘Damn you Oddie!’ and returned to the car where I sat for the next two hours, watching the gate to the Springwatch site through my binoculars. Now I really was a paparazzo.
Once again I was thwarted. He must have snuck out of a secret exit, hidden in the boot of one of the suspicious-looking cars I’d seen, or set up camp inside the farm. I contemplated buying a tent and pitching it outside the gate – he’d have to pass me at some point! I’ll just wait him out!
But then I remembered my life and drove off to Taunton to vent my frustration on a very lovely Devon audience.
9 June
Apparently I wasn’t the only person who felt that the England team definitely was going to win the World Cup. With the four-year wait nearly over, the English press were now talking of little else, hyping up our chances at every possible opportunity. World Cup fever had infected the nation, and unlike bird flu, nearly everyone was affected. I freely admit that by the time Germany kicked off against Costa Rica at 5 p.m. on Friday, 9 June, all thoughts of birds or birdwatching were at the very back of my mind. Maybe even in a different part of my body altogether.
Blinded by this football flu, the day after my latest failed Oddie quest I did something of which I am still quite ashamed: I went into my local Kensal Green newsagent and bought 200 packets of Panini stickers (football players, not toasted sandwiches). I hadn’t really planned to collect football stickers during the World Cup, but I do occasionally buy a copy of the News of the World, just for the sports section obviously, and one of their special football issues in May came with a free 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany Official Sticker Album. A free sticker album! How can anyone say it’s not a clever newspaper?
By the opening day of the tournament I was only five stickers short of completing it. I still hadn’t got Ronaldhino, Jermain Defoe (yes, I know, he wasn’t even in the squad but you still want him in the album, don’t you?) and three (yes, three!) Japanese stickers – the shiny team badge, Takayuki Suzuki (a 5ft 10″ midfielder from Ibaraki) and Keiji Tamada (a nine-and-a-half-stone striker who plays for Nagoya Grampus Eight).
I was twenty-seven years old.
The thing is, you can’t chuck a Panini Sticker Album in the bin. Especially when the paper throws in a free packet of stickers that includes Wayne Rooney and Thierry Henry. It was a sly and crafty ploy by the publishers, and I was well and truly ensnared.
In the halcyon days of Mexico ’86 – when the Hungarian keeper Peter Disztl amused kids with his beard and the tournament’s mascot Pique (an anthropomorphic chilli pepper) proved especially elusive – the football sticker system was simple. You spent your pocket money on as many packets of stickers as possible, gradually built up your collection, then swapped duplicates with like-minded collectors in the playground (using the only two words in the swap lexicon: ‘need’ and ‘got’).
Now things had moved on. Yes, the playground option was still available, but as I said, I was twenty-seven years old. Hanging round schools had to be a last resort. Unfortunately like-minded, similarly aged collectors were much harder to find. I did have a few friends who had also, independently, decided they would collect pictures of all the faces of all the footballers at the tournament and adhere them to a book, but not enough to guarantee the completion of my album.
Luckily, in the twenty-first century a grown-up sticker-obsessive could trawl the internet, using sites like eBay to buy, sell or, ideally, swap stickers with people from all over the world. In the weeks leading up to the World Cup, I sent off twenty-eight envelopes containing between one and nineteen stickers to everywhere from Rotherham to Bishop Auckland, and in return heard the pulse-quickening thud of twenty-seven (Ian Duffy from Stansted failed to keep his side of the bargain) similar packages on my own doormat.
Most of my fellow collectors claimed that they were looking for stickers on behalf of their children, and for a while I felt that if I wanted to have any myself (children, not stickers) I’d have to put this sort of thing behind me. But then I decided that these people were probably lying about their ‘children’ to save face – much more devious a crime than being upfront about one’s childishness – so I carried on. Internet swapping was, I felt, a rewarding and efficient method, although when sending a solitary sticker first class I did wonder if I was getting value for money.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find anybody with a spare Fernando Torres, and my patience had been so severely tested
by the wasted trip to Devon that I snapped. Being twenty years older than I was the last time I’d collected the stickers, I now had a credit card in my wallet instead of the traditional demi (current school yard slang for 50p, apparently). So when I realised I could ask for the entire box of stickers instead of the usual two packets I went on a mental safari and did it. In fact, I bought two boxes. I felt like Veruca Salt. And, at the time, that felt good.
It took me thirty minutes to go through every single sticker in the packets, and I found only three I needed. Just three! Out of a thousand! It then took me another hour to arrange the remaining stickers into numerical order so I could alert my swapping contacts to these fresh spares. By the time I’d finished, the initial euphoria of my outlandish purchase had worn off. I still had two stickers to find and now I just felt dirty. I’d behaved badly.
It shouldn’t be about filling up your album as quickly as possible. It’s about the chase, the rareties, the Zeljko Kalacs. It’s about meeting up with an old friend for the first time in five years, just to trade the Tunisian keeper for Stuttgart’s Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion (53,200 capacity); sharing a knowing smile with a stranger at Nuno Valente’s impossibly fat face; people on eBay saying they’re collecting for their sons when we all know that’s only half the story. It’s about a small but happy community sharing this intimate, beloved, pointless knowledge. It’s like birdwatching.
10 June
In what was a predictably anticlimactic start to England’s World Cup campaign, the team just about managed to scrape past Paraguay 1–0 thanks to a lucky own goal. Instantly the media tide changed and the unjustified belief of the nation lurched into unwarranted pessimism. ‘We’re never going to win this tournament again!’ shouted pundits, ‘Dire!’ and ‘Dismal!’ screamed the headlines, while I remained quietly confident that we would emerge victorious. In order to back up my gut feeling with some research, I watched pretty much every match shown on TV. I didn’t see any new birds.
My only bird-relief was that Duncton was also following the World Cup with some interest. He was still out at a nature reserve at least once a week, but he seemed just a tiny bit preoccupied by the tournament. I’d never thought of him as a particularly fanatical football supporter but maybe that’s because he’s a Tottenham Hotspur fan. They haven’t had an awful lot to shout about in recent years. But in the glory days of the early 1960s and the early 1980s, he’d often been there in the stands, cheering them on. When I was looking through my old scrapbooks for evidence of early birding, I stumbled across a couple of Duncton’s:
This one was from 1961, when Duncton was twelve years old. Every page is filled with cuttings lovingly taken from the sports pages, featuring headlines like: ‘Blanchflower & Mackay Keep Spurs on Top’, ‘Greaves can put Spurs Back on that Pedestal’ and ‘Spurs Beat Wednesday to Win Championship’.
Nowadays Duncton makes at least one pilgrimage up to White Hart Lane each year and has even persuaded Mum (the staunch Motherwell and Queen of the South fan) to become a member. Each year they get birthday cards from the skipper and gaffer,3 as well as much-treasured club scarves, credit card wallets, clocks and tie pin badges.
Somehow, therefore, Duncton combines his interest in sport with his birdwatching. Like David with his music, Duncton is no one-dimensional obsessive; birds are a part of his life but he’s able to do other things. Since retiring he’s taken up the sport of real tennis4 and somehow finds time to play a game or two every month.
Meanwhile, I spent nearly every day of the month watching, thinking and talking about football. I couldn’t do anything else.
15 June
England beat Trinidad and Tobago 2–0 and still the critics weren’t happy. ‘Not good enough’, apparently. I’m generally an optimistic person – I always think Liverpool are going to win and everything is going to be OK and, I guess, that has generally been the case – so I couldn’t understand the stick the players were getting. More important to me was the fact that I had finished my Panini album. It had taken me about a month but when I stuck in the final face5 I was genuinely happy. I’d done it.
I admit that I was a tiny bit worried about my life. Was it normal to be collecting stickers at my age? More to the point, was it normal to be collecting stickers with such ruthless efficiency at my age?
I realised that I might be a touch obsessive compulsive. If I start something like a sticker album (or a birdwatching year or a meal), I have to finish it, as illogical as it might be to do so. What’s more, I like starting things like sticker albums. But then several of my friends also had to finish their Panini sticker albums. My brother Mat has to find out who got the runs in the test match. A lot of men, it seemed, have this urge to collect – whether it be stickers, stamps or statistics, there’s something about the process that appeals to the male of the species. I can’t really speak for women, because I don’t know many and don’t completely understand the ones that I do, but as far as I can tell, they don’t have quite the same urge. Rachel has got a lot of pairs of shoes and handbags, but not a ridiculous amount (I ended up with about 750 spare stickers).
Laying these concerns about my behaviour to one side, my only remaining worry was that having lovingly placed the completed album in a cupboard (not on a table where people might, God forbid, touch it) I now had quite a large gap in my life. How would I cope without my daily packet purchase ritual? I could go out birdwatching, but then I might miss a good match. I clearly needed to focus on the football. Otherwise England might not win.
Instead of stickers, then, I went back to W H Smith the next day and bought Shoot, Match and FourFourTwo. I still wasn’t really enjoying the birdwatching magazines – they’d been gradually stacking up in the sitting room, making me feel guilty and Rachel annoyed – but I did like the idea of subscribing to something. I suppose I was a little jealous of people who went to the special interests section each month, who hadn’t abandoned their youthful passion, who still cared about ridiculous things. Even my interest in football, I realised, wasn’t strong enough to be classed as a hobby. I liked it, yes, but I didn’t subscribe to a magazine. Well, not till now.
20 June
After watching the first two matches on my own or with Rachel I met up with a big group of friends to see England take on Sweden. It’s at times like these that I appreciate how different my view of football is to that of other people. My friend Owen (who had joined me in the kitchen for some hungover stag birdwatching in January), knows the height, weight and birthplace of every player, Key has strong opinions about the formation Sven chooses and what impact each substitute might make, while Phill the Stratford romantic has even stronger opinions about absolutely everything. By half time it was clear that they all thought England were rubbish.
I tend not to worry so much about details like whether we’re actually any good or not. The final score was England 2 Sweden 2, enough to see us through to the next round. That, to me, was all that mattered. We were still on track to win the thing. To my disappointment I’d struggled with my new football magazines – the only bits I really enjoyed were interviews with Liverpool players. I’m afraid that sums up my whole relationship with England football. I enjoy the matches, but I’m really just hoping that the Liverpool players will do well. When England beat Germany 5–1 in their own backyard back in 2001 (probably their best result of my lifetime) I felt particularly proud not because I’m English but because all the goals were scored by Liverpool players (Owen 3, Gerrard and Heskey). There’s no real logic to these feelings. I’m not from Liverpool, I don’t know these people. But I have spent most of my life caring about the club, so much so that it has become a part of me. I am a Liverpool fan. In the same way that Duncton is a birder.
But why am I not also a birder? Duncton spent as much time showing us birds as football during our formative years, so why did I turn my back on one in favour of the other? For now, too late, it seemed to me that I might have chosen the wrong hobby. My passion for football was flawed, it was shal
low, and it didn’t seem nearly as fulfilling as birding was for Duncton. I love the whole business of the World Cup: the achingly long build-up, the conjecture, the politics. I love the fact that because it only comes up every four years, each tournament represents a distinct time in your life. I remember bemoaning Maradona’s Hand of God with my family in the living room in ’86; I watched USA ’94 while on a school trip in Italy, witnessing the Brazilians beating the Italians on penalties while drunkenly failing to chat up some Italian girls; Ronaldinho’s flukey free kick that knocked us out of the tournament in 2002 marked the end of my and Rachel’s extended studenthood.
But a three-week burst of emotion every four years isn’t a great return for a hobby, especially when really I’m only watching the two or so Liverpool players on the field. Duncton is thrilled by birds every day. Of course the Premiership does provide that constant appeal, the rolling of the seasons reflecting the annual cycles of our birds. But while the daily dramas of birdlife – the great struggles with predators, the death-defying migrations, the nest-building, the song-singing, the gliding, soaring, hovering, swooping – are weighty, important, natural things, the Premiership seasons seem slightly ludicrous, silly, even ugly in comparison.
While we worship our heroes for kicking a ball about forty odd times a year, the modest swift travels 14,000 miles, eating, sleeping and copulating on the wing. That’s gruelling and skilful. A swift can stay airborne for three straight years. The tiny hummingbird, weighing no more than a penny, can cross the 600-mile Gulf of Mexico in a single flight, determinedly beating its little wings 200 times every single second. And it’s not just flying that sets birds apart. The flightless erect-crested penguin has been known to travel 4,000 miles from their home in New Zealand, hopping over icebergs and swimming through waves 120 feet high in the Drake Passage, to finally land at the Falkland Islands a few months later. That’s incredible.
Sure, the FA Cup occasionally throws up romantic surprises like an American robin in Peckham, but the preposterous prices, the petulant tiffs and the pathetic play-acting that dominate the Premiership just didn’t seem so important to me all of a sudden.