Dear Reader: Beaten by Big Garden Bird Watch!

By Graham Chalmers
NADV110729 Gered Mankowitz @ Red House. Gered Mankowitz and Graham Chalmers. (110729AM2)NADV110729 Gered Mankowitz @ Red House. Gered Mankowitz and Graham Chalmers. (110729AM2)
NADV110729 Gered Mankowitz @ Red House. Gered Mankowitz and Graham Chalmers. (110729AM2)

Anyone who doubts our modern lives have been thoroughly seduced by the smell of cafe culture should have been at Bean & Bud on Saturday night.

It’s not so much that this fabulous little coffee house is one of 10 such independents now located in Harrogate town centre.

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Or that the party to celebrate it’s fifth birthday on Commercial Street was absolutely packed out.

It was the atmosphere.

Gathered together cheek by jowl was a carnival of characters who’d probably never previously been in one place at the same time.

Artists, baristas (obviously), writers, gallery owners, customers (obviously), shops owners, PR executives, charity volunteers, a DJ, burlesque performer and a large Chinese dragon.

It felt exactly the same as being at an art gallery launch.

Everything wasn’t rosy in our rumble tumble little garden on Sunday morning.

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We were 40 minutes into the RSPB’s hour-long Big Garden Bird Watch and we hadn’t seen a thing out of our back window. Not a dicky bird.

There were plenty of birds around but none of them were landing in our garden.

My much-trumpeted ‘stale bread and raisons’ strategy had achieved nothing.

At one point I got excited when a fuzzy blur of milky white flew past our window but it turned out to be a feather in the wind.

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Just as I was beginning to think the entire ornithological world had colluded to create a bird exclusion zone round our house, I spotted the whirr of little wings.

A long-tailed tit hopped on a branch in front of my eyes, then another, then a lovely little blue tit.

Altogether in the final five minutes of this annual bird-watching nightmare 11 birds stopped off at our address.

Then, as quickly as they’d come, they were off.

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