Shut Your Beak

It's only early February and already I'm being woken at 5 am by the Dawn Chorus. I stand to be corrected by any twitchers among my readership but I thought that cacophony didn't occur in the middle of winter, so is this another effect of global warming? It doesn't help that I have a large tree quite close to my bedroom window.

My favourite birdsong, if you can call it such, is that of the wood pigeon but they seem to be late risers and don't contribute their more soothing sound to the early morning shrieking. I saw one of 'my' pair of wood pigeons on the garden fence this week and it was nearly the size of a hen. Apparently, they're the largest flying birds in Europe but this one is getting so obese that it will soon struggle to get off the runway. I suspect it lies around all day watching Jerry Springer shows and eating pizza. No wonder the lazy bastard can't get up in time to welcome the dawn of a new day.

The picture, by the way, is several years old. Climate change isn't so advanced here that the bluebells are in bloom. Give them another week or so. But I thought it would cheer up anyone for whom the thought of spring gets their sap rising.
Did you know that spring is a peak time for suicides?

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Because I was late to bed last night I can reveal the uncensored content of the email that Alastair Campbell sent to Newsnight. It read "Fuck off, you twats."
It's the lead in today's Evening Standard and you can expect to see a lot more of it in tomorrow's papers, mostly with a great many ********.

Actually, Newsnight bleeped the first word which is rather odd because the other night I flicked to BBC1 at 10.30 and there was Billy Connolly in full rant at about 20 unbleeped fucks a minute.
But the episode proves again what a liability Campbell is and how stupid Blair was to bring him back for the election. He's supposed to be a master of public relations but I wonder which PR course teaches you to respond to a media enquiry with 'Fuck off, you twats.'

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Today's Daily Politics programme had an item about political blogging. It was short, shallow and failed to distinguish between blogs and political websites. But I mention it because the presenters seemed to think the very idea of blogging was hysterically funny. The woman who sits next to Andrew Neil - Daisy somebody, Daisy Fuckwit perhaps - admitted she could hardly say the word blogging without laughing. She's the one who reads out viewers' emails so presumably she knows what the internet is.

Maybe it's that strange British thing (if it is a British thing) of sneering at new technology and pretending to be baffled by it. David Dimbleby does it every week on Question Time, pretending not to understand web addresses or interactive television. Is this some kind of snobbery by the so-called intelligentsia in this country? I think it's time the 'blogging community', especially the over-50 section of it, stormed the television studios and banged their smug heads together.