Diary – 11 June 2015

Down here in west Cornwall, the days are long and summer is on the wing. Like the Tories in Scotland, the tiny population of Cornish choughs continue to defy extinction, clinging on like crazy with their little red feet, simply refusing to die out. Six nests with chicks have been monitored this year, while the birds themselves enjoy a higher level of security and protection than a Russian mafioso. I am dying to see one, forever scanning the cliffs with my binoculars, trying and failing not to be a holiday cliché. Middle-aged woman in Breton top, bakes her own bread and stares at the sea for hours on end. Chough spotting! Wildflower pressing! What is happening to me? I have become the person I used to hate; someone who takes photograph of sunsets and obsesses about birds.

The EU Red List of Birds, published last week, detailed its concerns about several species in the south-west of England. The yellowhammer, the linnet and the skylark are all declining, but the cuckoo is the biggest loser of all down here. As indeed it is across the whole of the UK except in Scotland, where numbers are oddly flourishing. ‘If you are a cuckoo right now, you really want to be in Scotland,’ Paul Stancliffe of the British Trust for Ornithology told the Western Morning News. Well that’s one explanation for recent voting patterns.

What fresh hell is this? The editor of a glossy magazine gets in touch to ask if I can get hold of the new female Viagra. No, she’s not asking for a friend, not like that time she wanted to know which London hotel Bradley Cooper was staying in. She wants a journalist to take some and write about it — but why me? I can think of at least half a dozen media saucebuckets and she-freaks who’d be better suited to the task and I don’t just mean you, L… well, never mind.