Wood pigeons were my morning wake-up call at home in the UK, amazingly they have followed me here, but joined by rather a lot of other birds and crickets – well they might be crickets. With fields all around and pine trees opposite, flying things are busy going here and there. But the crickets make it sound like a jungle. They are so loud and make a noise a bit like the buzz of electric wires, although I never see them… Well that’s what I thought, until the other day when I was lounging somewhere in the sunshine (a very rare occurrence, of course) and I felt something on my leg. Looking down I saw what looked like a massive piece of tree on my leg, grey-brown and alien-looking. I didn’t scream (just quietly whispered something under my breath) and shook my leg, it didn’t move. It wasn’t dead because its antennae were moving scarily. I had to flick it off in the end and it flew onto the path. It was probably as long as my hand, so maybe it wasn’t a cricket…I think they are green and not so large. It reminded me of a heavily armoured stick insect. We had a battalion of those in a tank for a number of months, until the children got tired of them. We couldn’t give them away, no one else wanted them, and so in the end I emptied them into the privet hedge in our garden in Catterick. That sounds a bit like a Simon Mayo confession…what will have happened to them? Could they have weathered the Yorkshire winter and adapted into hardy locusts that will eventually feed on privet hedges? And are our privet hedges now under threat? But that would be a good thing, surely, and therefore my evil dead should be forgiven!

I’m not a member of the RSPCB but the birds are a bit of a concern. There’s been talk of air rifles and other lethal weapons, a stuffed owl to frighten them away and all manor of unsuitable ways to stop them using our gazebo as a toilet. They do make a lot of mess as they sit on the electric wires across part of the terrace, where they like to chat, sing a bit, relax and to be frank crap… Someone is getting very upset and even though he isn’t having to sweep up the mess, clean down paths and wash patio furniture, he is the one planning awful ends for these poor little birds. The other day we heard the locals catch them in nets and cook them. In fact a restaurant we went to recently had a special dish set in the middle of the table from which a group of diners were spooning out large dollops of what looked like a kind of stew. You could hear them laughing and joking, drinking and making crunching noises…someone asked them what they were eating. “The birds…” they said, smiling and crunching some more…”delicious.” The crunching noise was – you guessed it – the little bones in the small birds! Help, I must find out the name of this dish and never order it.

I’m not sure what offends me so much about eating sparrows and small birds, as I will happily cook a chicken. Eating and crunching small bones is a big part of it, but it also seems a bit like eating rats and mice… like them birds eat a lot of junk and they really are a bit like skin and bone, so to me eating them would be akin to eating worms and beetles – one step on. And however much we see celebrities choking their way through a meal of disgusting looking insects on TV, it can’t be healthy or Tescos would stock them.

Time to sort out some meat for the BBQ – and I’m not cooking it unless I’ve seen the wrapper and checked it against my list of edible food.