My husband has been nagging me to find a new hobby. I spend all day at work blankly at a computer monitor, then come home and disappear to the allotment.
I took him at his word and decided to investigate various alternate occupations for my spare time.
After rejecting such delights as collecting toe nail clippings, and making amusing pictures from the stuff that comes out of plugholes, I decided to give bird-watching a try.
The first thing to do to prepare for such a demanding hobby, is spend hours on the internet looking for the best possible buy in binoculars. Then spending a fortune on the credit card to obtain the super-zoom bi-ocular cannot-do-it-without-them pair of my choice.
That done, I perused the Internet for further hours looking at pictures of birds. They are mostly brown things with feathers. Hmmmm, not exactly attention grabbing. I don’t want to spend my precious spare time looking at drab bundles of feathers pecking the odd seed. If I am going to do this bird watching-thingy, I will aim for the top.
Eagles.
To be exact, fish eagles.
I saw them on the tele doing things like diving from great heights, and spearing enormous wriggly fish with their beaks. That’s more like it.
You may think living in Cheshire a bit of a draw-back when it comes to watching fish-eagles, but I was never one to let circumstances get the better of me. I surveyed my territory with an eye to making it a warm and welcoming place for the king of all fish eagles.
First thing that I realised was the fish eagles, by their nature, needed fish, and fish need water. I inflated the kid’s paddling pool. Fifty two buckets of water later, a gleaming pool sat in the middle of our lawn. It looked a bit empty, but a visit to the bathroom provided two plastic ducks, and a frog that swims quite well when you wind it up.
The flaw in my plans appeared.
Fish.
I had none.
The freezer had two fish fingers, with most of the breadcrumbs knocked off. Not very appetising. I had two tins of pilchards from Christmas hampers long forgotten. They are only a few years out of date, and the rust won’t matter. Where is the dratted tin opener?
Ok, we are in business. I threw half a tin of pilchards into the pool, and spread some appetisingly round the garden. I draped a couple appetisingly from tree branches, to enable passing eagles to see them and whet their appetite.
Happily I retired to the living room, to watch patiently through my binoculars for my first eagle.
The biggest panther you ever saw entered the garden and started eating my pilchards
With a scream I threw the nearest thing, my new binoculars at it. I had to protect myself at all costs, I am too young to die by being eaten alive in my own home. The binoculars bounced of the window and landed on the ground with an unpleasant rattle. I am sure they shouldn’t rattle. Looking out of the window I saw that the panther had shrunk into next-doors cat. Dratted binoculars make everything look bloody enormous.
I banged on the window to chase the cat away. This was too much for the window, which sagged outwards and cracked slowly across. I watched, my mouth dropping open slowly, as the top half of the window fell out from the pain and broke into a million pieces on the ground. The good thing was that it scared the cat away.
It took a couple of hours to get someone to come and mend the window, and by then it was going dark. Sadly I left my hobby until the next day.
I sleep like a log, but the neighbours didn’t. It seems that pilchards are an irresistible snack for hedgehogs, and the greatest hedgehog aphrodisiac every known. Two in the morning awakened the neighbourhood to the grunts and groans of hedgehogs having the time of their lives, very noisily. Its amazing how much noise those little bundles of prickles can make.
The next morning I was not Miss Popular. The people next door would not even say good morning. I am sure it was them who burst my paddling pool, but it may have been the spines on a passing hedgehog.
My husband has told me I should spend more time on the computer as I am safer doing that.
Have you ever considered a new hobby?
