If I wore a big floppy puritan's hat and lived a few hundred years ago, I know how I'd pronounce on the mobile phone (always assuming Nokia had worked out how to build one then).
Spitting fire and brimstone there are times I'd denounce it as the devil's earpiece, when I wasn't scourging the wicked, outlawing Hawai'ian shirts and generally banning fun.
I'd have happily cast it into the fires of hell as my Cap'n Pugwash ringtone told me there was a message like yesterday's.
Not two hours after blogging on about the potential of a good seawatch I got a text from Barry McCarthy, who was happily hunkered down on Formby Point in the maw of a nice north westerly _ "Sooty Shr south close in, 9.40. Also 2 Storm P" _ colleagues in the office could hear my teeth gnashing from 20 paces.
Bazzo deserved the sooty shearwater_ a mega bird for the Point _ as he spends more time scanning the waves down there than anyone I know, but it still hurt to get the news.
What goes round comes around I suppose _ I'd bombarded him with texts only a month or so ago when I was seawatching off Aird an Runair in the Outer Hebs as stormies, thousands of manx shearwaters and auks zoomed past me, arctic terns screamed over head and fulmars sailed past.
Predictably he was at Formby Point at the time and seeing nothing, but that's seawatching...some days marvellous, others nothing to do but stare at a vast expanse of sea playng "I spy with my little eye something beginning with "w"."
Nice one Baz.
Elsewhere there's a pec sand at Leighton and the flock of ruddy shelducks are still touring the Lancashire coast.
With the wind dropping this morning I think my chances of a weekend seawatch are slim, but the "ticking" calls of robins in my garden remind me that autumn isn't far off, with all the unpuritanical joys of chasing rarities at birding fleshpots like Spurn and the Scillies.
Have a good weekend, don't miss my DP column tomorrow (etc etc) and remember....eyes to the skies everyone, eyes to the skies.
PS Oh yeah, I almost forgot, if you have any news, e-mail me at john.dempsey@liverpool.com
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