As we are approaching the longest day of the year in a couple of weeks, the first faint glimmer of light appears at about 4 o'clock in the morning. How do I know? Well, I have to get out of bed at that time due to age and also because I am sure I should have been a bird. Whatever the time of year, I wake up when it starts to get light and my eyes are programmed to close when it gets dark. Having a catnap doesn't even stop this!
Anyway, I usually have a look out of the windows and then get back into bed and lie there listening to the birds as they start breaking into song. It all starts with the blackbirds and soon spreads with all the smaller birds joining in. I'm lucky that I can still distinguish the different songs of a lot of the birds despite living in the centre of a city for a quarter of a century. The real dawn chorus is beautiful to hear and eventually I drop back off to sleep.
My alarm is set for 6:45am and sometimes I wake up before this but around this time I come downstairs to make a cup of tea and go back up to listen to the news and drink my tea in bed.
That's when the second 'dawn chorus' starts and it's not pleasant at all. It's the time the commuters arrive in their cars to find a free parking space for the day and they are not fussy about how they park or who they disturb. It seems that they are all deaf because as they start to arrive my ears are assaulted with a variety of thumping, tuneless music and rap which makes the cars 'bounce' off the road. Then it takes them (usually the male of the species) at least twenty manoeuvres to get the smallest of cars (with the loudest exhausts) into a space big enough to park a double decker bus or chieftan tank ....or both!
These cars all have about six doors and although they are occupied by a single 'driver' , this person then proceeds to open every door one by one then closes them with a loud 'slam'.
That's not the end of it though because they check and double check that they have 'beeped' it and off they go, only to return thirty seconds later to go through the whole process of opening, slamming and beeping again before finally disappearing.
Give me birds rather than men any day!!!!!!!
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