Jam Tart

The past few days have been quite a mix of things. Aside from the usual mix of writing, birding, plotting and planning there was also quite a lot of culture thrown in to boot.

I finally finished a piece on Brown Bears that will appear on Birdguides.com in the very near future. I hardly mentioned birds in it and it's the first piece I've written as The Urban Birder that doesn't focus on birds. I also completed my latest piece for Bird Watching Magazine which all about the urban birding in west London.

The culture bits included a visit to the Mall Gallery last night to check out the 'jam tart' on display at the RSPB hosted Society of Wildlife Artists art exhibition. There was some cracking work on show including pieces created by my mate and President of the SWLA, Harriet Mead. Check out her work. Tonight I went to a screening at BAFTA in Piccadilly to see a BBC4 film called Enid, starring Helena Bonham Carter. It was a biopic about the life and times of Enid Blyton. Afterwards, Helena was on hand for a quick Q&A. She is has a quirky sense of humour.

Anyway, time to prepare for my trip on Monday accompanied by wildlife photographer Dean Eades. I've just learnt that the guide that's supposed to be taking us around wants us to pay him a daily rate of $150 plus pay for a car and petrol. This would have been fine if I was going on a birding holiday but I'm there in a journalistic capacity, so this latest bit of late news was a bit of an annoying addition to my preparation.

Ah well, let's see what happens.