One of my favourites:
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I won’t fill the pages with these, so this should be my last but …
THIS sums up how managers fear women.
This is proof that annual reviews offer so much more than we realise.
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Bursting with excitement, I’ve just seen my first Kingfisher. After 35 years on the Somerset Levels and zilch, a couple of weeks in Bristol on the shores of the muddy Avon I watched one for about 10 minutes as it fished, following the river downstream. And wonder of wonders, it didn’t retreat to the undergrowth but used the mudbanks for perching. Predictably I’d left my phone behind 
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Coo, how splendid!
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It certainly was Hedgers. I’d been told there were kingfishers on the river,. but really wasn’t expecting them in such a built environment.
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Oh beezer. I’m properly jealous.
Going back i trust.
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Ooh yes. Puggies and I walk by the river several times a day. Daughter’s apartment overlooks the river but it’s too high for spotting small birds.
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Hurrah! Brilliant about the kingfisher: I saw one on that stretch once, when the jazz band was playing on one of the river-boats which go up that section to the pub whose name I have forgotten where you used to have supper.
It seemed completely unbothered about a large boat, and a gang of people playing the Saint Louis Blues right beside it.
I am glad they are still there.
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Oh Marjorie, how wonderful. ‘Halcyon at 3 o’clock’. There is a place up by Builth Wells where the little buggers cavort. If one does not have one’s camera, natch. Otherwise cavortage is very thin on the banks.
There probably is a noun for the improbable eventuality that you get a bunch of the wee buggers together, but may I propose ‘A Delight of Kingfishers’ to the board?
It’s probably a) taken; and b) really weak, compared to other suggestions, so come on and suggest. The Collective needs a collective noun to call its own.
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“A delight of kingfishers” is lovely. However, according to this (not entirely serious, and certainly not definitive) list it’s a “crown”:
I particularly like “a museum of waxwings”
As for ourselves, an “ejection” is one possibility, but an ejection of what? We really need a generic term before there can be a collective noun.
Or how about a “disgruntlement”? “Banishment”?
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A tidal river is totally new bird watching territory for me. Around low tide it’s approximately one third the width of high water so there’s a huge concentration of edibles. This is when the action happens. Last week masses of ducks/small geese came down river with the tide, I counted about 40 in 10 minutes and described them as a flotilla. Daughter asked me if that was a collective, but it worked.
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Tell that daughter, Marjorie dere, that ‘flotilla’ was not a ‘collective’ so much as a warning. Time to be afraid when 40 geese, give or take, are mustering. And I should know. I spent a very informative few hours as a goose.
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Assuming it wasn’t a simple mispronunciation, you’re can’t leave it at that!
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Would ‘A Detachment’ serve?
‘A museum’ is indeed lovely but a bit redolent of those horrible big bell jars with stuffed birds in them. If you want a brawl and goings on, bring in the goldfinches. How about a Riot of (Them)?I would be inclined to suggest a ‘Brawl’, but that is already taken on behalf of sparrows by Yeats, W.B.
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Not a mispronunciation. I was, briefly, a goose. No, I know it makes no sense to read. It doesn’t make much sense to tell, but it was either a gift or an admonishment to me from the geese I lived with that summer. And it was very strange indeed.
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Tease!
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A friend of mine lived on a housing estate where, to get to the town and the shops, you walked about twenty yards along the towpath, then crossed the canal.
When people were coming back with shopping bags, they’d see a goose on the path in front of them. “Oh, how nice.” But they didn’t want to disturb it, so they’d slow down.
Twenty thousand* geese would quietly get out of the water onto the towpath behind them.
One of them would honk quietly.
The victims would turn round and go “um”.
Twenty thousand* geese would quietly get out of the water onto the towpath in front of them.
You didn’t want those shopping bags, did you?
- may not actually have been this many
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That woudn’t have been Alperton, would it, Hedgers?
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Nope, Ware in Hertfordshire.
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