I have an app on my phone that identifies birdsong so that when I am walking through the woods I can tell a woodpecker from a robin.
Every so often it insists on playing an advert that ironically makes me much less likely to buy whatever it is selling and makes me too bitter and resentful to buy the full version and get rid of the ads.
The app, while sometimes very pleasing, seems to think that a lot of birds are wood-pigeons but I don’t know enough about birdsong to know that it’s wrong.
At home, my daughter is complaining that group presentation work for her child development module is shoddy.
“The girl in my group who did the introduction didn’t even state the name of the research paper,” she says
“Why don’t you just record it again?”
“It was hard enough to get the group together to do it once”
“I would have thought doing it remotely was easier for everyone”
“Not really because one of the girls just sits in her room smoking weed, falls asleep, and forgets about the Zoom call.”
My son is frantically searching for new TV’s in the Black Friday sale even though it is now Black Saturday preceding what is presumably, still quite dark Sunday before Cyber Monday.
“Aren’t most of these deals the same as deals available at other times?” I ask him
“Probably, but we need a new TV.”
The last time I looked the TV was working perfectly well.
As I am in the kitchen trying to prise open the iced-up lower drawer of the freezer he explains he is using the voucher sent by the insurance company when the garage was broken into and the old TV was stolen from there.
I wonder how much new technology one can have without needing to store some of it in the garage.
As I’m going at the bottom of the freezer with a fish slice he calls,
“Why don’t you get a new fridge freezer in the sales?”
“Because there’s nothing wrong with this one,” I call back realising that the middle drawer is also stuck to the rear of the unit by a huge block of ice.
I fall into the vortex and start looking at fridge freezers on my laptop.
“Get one with an ice maker,” my daughter says
“Those are huge double door monstrosities and they wouldn’t fit,” I say whilst thinking about how I could actually climb into one when everything gets too much.
Talking myself down from a new frost-free fridge freezer I read a news article about Black Friday and how Nintendo Switch consoles have sold out everywhere but Aldi.
I don’t even know what a Nintendo Switch is but I navigate to the Aldi website to see what the fuss is about and find I am number 274000 in a queue for something I don’t want.
I feel a headache coming on.
“I’m off out for a walk” I call as I scoop up the dog’s lead and prise her off a chair she leaves extremely reluctantly.
In the valley, it is blessedly quiet and the crisp autumn air is a mix of leaf mold and wood fire.
Rounding the corner there is a heron sitting on a small island in the pond.
I watch for a minute or so before it flaps its huge wings and rises up, disappearing through the valley and over the trees.
As it flies I hear its call, a sound like a small dog with a sharp bark. I look at the app on my phone.
“Wood-pigeon”.
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