Pornithology?

Haviside's Dolphins - their relevance to this blog will become apparent (Sacha Barbato & Nathalie Gilbert)

I woke up expecting to feel lower than a dolphin's droppings, but instead I felt great - and this was despite the grey, wet weather outside of my bedroom window.

It was also despite the fact that I had promised a friend of mine that I would help him move from his flat in Shoreditch into his newly found girlfriend's basement flat in Stoke Newington. So I drove across to east London a largely alien territory to me, a certified west London boy. We humped various unnecessarily heavy boxes including a ginormous TV that was surely the weight of three small dead baby elephants.

He then handed me a much lighter box and asked me to look after it as he didn't want his girlfriend to discover it. Curious, I cried 'what's in the box', a bit like Brad Pitt in the last desert scene in 'Seven'. Matter-of -factly he answered 'it's my porn'. I'm now the trustee of 'Debbie Does Dallas' and other similar works. The things you do for your mates!

Back at home, I got cracking on getting pictures together for my talk on Monday. I really do need to rehearse it. Radio 5 Live called me and asked me if I would be interested in being interviewed tomorrow night about this weekend's RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch as it is the 30th anniversary. Naturally I agreed, so I will be on at around 9pm for a few minutes on Saturday night.

It also reminded me that I have not indulged in any ornithology for sometime. That has to be remedied. The only birds I noticed today were a group of six aerially chasing Common Gulls that were screaming at the top of their lungs over Stoke Newington. I paused from struggling with a massive box that was about to split to admire those gorgeous gulls.