Dear Reader: Beaten by Big Garden Bird Watch!
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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Hide AdOr 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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Hide AdWe 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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Hide AdJust 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.