My Middle-Aged Gap Year
It has just occurred to me that to write about Day Three of my middle-aged gap year, I ideally would have already experienced Day Three i.e. I would write this either late on Day Three or early on Day Four. Perhaps you thought that is what I was already doing. Surely he wouldn't write about Day Three at the start of Day Three, you would very sensibly think.
Well... at least I've realised this now, only a couple of days into the blog. Imagine the palava had I realised this a couple of months in. It could have led to all manners of confusion. Therefore this post can serve as an amuse bouche ahead of an update to be written later today or tomorrow. Whilst I cannot promise the post will get any more interesting, I can promise there will definitely be more words. Hurrah for more words!
I will note that yesterday (Day Two) was a bit of a non-day waiting in for a courier who finally arrived in the late afternoon. It did though give me enough time to research and purchase some binoculars. I may have jumped a little early into this bird watching business but I do like finding a new hobby that requires me to research something and spend money on it.
Who knew there was so much to consider when buying binoculars. Well mainly it seemed like three things - magnification (8 times or 10 times appears to be best for birders) and the field of vision. The third consideration being whether I wanted to sell one of the children to be able to justify the cost of the top-end binoculars.
Ultimately I opted for a 'good beginner's pair' (Barr & Stroud series 8 8x42s) which as my wife would testify is very unlike me. Historically my approach has been if it's worth doing, then it's worth spending a lot of money on it. In fact, even if it's not really worth doing because I'll do it once and never again, then still, spend a lot of money on it.
But given 1. I am actually very much a beginner and 2. I'm not actually earning any money and 3. I've only been bird watching once (see Day Two writing about activity on Day One - confusing I know) when I saw no birds, I thought a c. £120 pair of binoculars was appropriate and supportable. I chose Barr & Stroud because someone on the internet called Neil English, who has clearly written an awful lot about binoculars, recommended them. What he doesn't know about binoculars and all that.
Having looked for 'nature spotting' books and discovered they all appear to be aimed at under 10s, I instead downloaded the 'merlin' bird app which as you might guess is a bird identifying app. Once those binoculars arrive, I thought it would be helpful to know what I'm actually looking at beyond it being a 'small brown coloured bird' plus it lets me log my sightings. Hopefully they don't track bird logs for any scientific purposes because I thought I should catch up with everything I typically see in my garden, logging them all as seen yesterday (Blue Tit, Great Tit, Pigeon, Magpie, Nuthatch, Goldfinch and Robin etc) when I have no idea if some of these would have left our shores for warmer climes by now.
The app purports to be able to identify birds from their song. As a rigorous test of its bird identifying capabilities, I stuck my phone out of the velux window of our converted loft bedroom, hit the sound record button and merlin identified the bird I could hear as a robin. The slight flaw with the test is that I couldn't see the bird producing the chirruping but there are definitely robins around here so I reckon that is incontrovertible proof it works.
It turns out this was a pretty big amuse bouche.