A few of my favourite things

I can remember writing some time ago about what a perfect day would look like. I seem to recall that Italian piazzas, bruschetta and prosecco featured prominently*, but I have written so many blogs over the past few years that I couldn’t find it among all the files. I was curious to see what I’d written because today’s blog is also about a great day. Rather than being helpful, looking back at all those blogs caused my thoughts to wander off in other directions. I always thought that one day I’d write a book and it occurred to me that if I put all my blogs together and bound them, surely that would constitute a book by now. This is my 163^rd blog and at about 500 words each, that equals 81,500 words. I have just looked it up and the average word count for an adult novel is 70,000-120,000. So, I think that technically I have written a book. In my view, most books are way too long these days, so limiting mine to 80,000 words would be doing everyone a favour. The only problem is the quality of the words in question. I don’t think Kate Atkinson will be worrying about the competition.

I then started to think about how many films are much too long now as well (three hours of Oppenheimer must be quite gruelling), but this was getting me nowhere, so I dragged myself back to the subject at hand, which is what happened yesterday. It began brilliantly when I noticed a little sparrow on my new bird feeder. I used to feed the birds simply by throwing food onto the grass until one day I saw a large rat happily dining on birdseed right in the middle of the lawn. In broad daylight. I thought rats were nocturnal, but obviously this one was making an exception. I can just about tolerate feeding greedy pigeons, but I draw the line at rats. I found a miraculous feeder online that was guaranteed to repel squirrels and fat pigeons (there was no mention of rats) and it’s now installed in the garden. After a few days I was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that it effectively repels all birdlife, but then I noticed a sparrow happily feeding at it. Later I saw two birds on the feeder and my happiness was complete.

Next, I booked the most exciting holiday ever for next year. It involves chimpanzees and gorillas in Uganda and the great wildebeest migration in Kenya. I’m thinking that the window of time available to me for trekking through the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in quest of primates is limited and it’s now or never. If I were much younger, I would be saying YOLO, but I’m not, so I won’t. I think I’ll need to go into training though: strolling along the Thames Path and weekly tai chi sessions aren’t really going to prepare me for the jungle. Although maybe nothing will.

As if this weren’t enough, I managed to reserve a sushi bag through Too Good To Go. This app is great – local shops and restaurants offer food that’s been reduced at the end of the day to save it from being wasted, and when I see sushi on offer, I pounce. Birds, gorillas, sushi: almost too many wonderful things in just one day.

*I did eventually find this blog, by the way, and piazzas, bruschetta and prosecco did not feature at all, which says something very interesting about the unreliability of memory. I feel next week’s blog coming on…