Fed by Birds

On the edge of Romney Marsh is Rye, which might seem like a twee tourist trap but is actually the epicentre of English eccentricity. It was fictionalised as Tilling in the Mapp and Lucia books by EF Benson when he was its mayor, and these days it's piled high with bric a brac - mainly bowler hats and croquet sets and other discarded trappings of Englishness - and populated with odd and garrulous characters. This book was found in a Rye bookshop, whose owner was full of information on inbreeding in the marsh and although she'd never been to nearby Dungeness, was very much looking forward to a trip round the nuclear power station one day soon.

It's an account of how the author befriended the birds around her Sussex cottage, and made a study of their psychology and individual characters. Her accounts of how blue tits and robins would fly up and communicate with her sound a bit mad, until you see the photos:

She describes an electrician coming to the cottage, and seeing the birds coming down to perch on her:

"His whole countenance seemed to alter, his face glowed, his eyes shone and he kept murmuring: 'How wonderful!' Then he said: 'But why shouldn't it be like that? It ought to be like that.'"

So it should. I plan to adjust my working methods to look more like this: