The Fat Bloke Diaries
THE FAT BLOKE MONTHLY
February 2010
Imagine you’re looking up to the sky. Nothing there, no threat, no danger. Suddenly the very air above you seems to tear apart. You never see it approaching, just feel the sickening thud as it slams into your back, death from on high, grasping you in its fearsome talons before carrying you off to its home. The last thing you see is the gaping mouths of its young, screaming at the parent to feed them chunks of your still struggling body....
You can see why fish stay away from Ospreys. Me? I’ll take any chance I can get to
watch them dive-
I know, that wasn’t the start you expected. The Fat Bloke Diaries were originally
designed to chart my exercising experiences from Fat Bloke to Still-
I've seen things you wouldn't believe. Pelicans silhouetted against sunset’s ball of fire off the shoulder of Cuba. I watched fox cubs playing in the dark near the garden gate. Given my memory, all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. (Award yourself ten points if you recognise that deliberate misquote.)
I’ve watched sea lions on an iceberg that was bigger than my house, glowing green
like eerie rock formations beneath the Northern Lights, and real live harbour seals
in a real live harbour, bobbing between the boats begging for scraps like dogs. That
didn’t seem too unusual, but the sight of turkey buzzards begging like dogs -
I’ve had a racoon run over my foot as it too tried to prise food from us tourists. It was a surprise to say the least, but nowhere near as much as the one that a skunk gave us when he took exception to us evicting him from beneath our car as we headed to the airport. Strangely enough we got an entire row to ourselves on that flight home.
And then there was the flying squirrel. I’ve got to be honest here and say that I
can’t really claim that one. My Beloved went to fetch beer and nibbles while I stayed
in the hotel room watching football on TV. I know, not very gallant of me. She’s
never let me forget it, forever telling me how beautiful and graceful it was as it
glided between the palm trees above her head. I missed seeing another exotic creature
during a trip through the desert, but this one was less cuddly. We’d parked up so
that I could take a photo of my Beloved against this desolate landscape. All sand,
rubble and one forlorn shrub bush casting a small, cooling shadow on the parched
earth. I urged her to step back so as to make a better picture, while I stepped a
few yards to the side for the same reason. Only I must have strayed just a little
too close to the bush. The shrub rattled in a way that was instantly familiar to
anyone who’s ever seen a Western movie. Not having a six-
I was in the car with the doors locked and the engine running before my Beloved could even register surprise. We never did get that photo. We never did see the rattlesnake. But we did get out of there as quickly as we could.
I’ve been lucky enough to see a big momma bear teaching her cub how to cross a road, walk among a colony of elephant seals, and watch countless grey, humpback and killer whales, some as curious of me as I was of them. Nature has a lot to show us, and I’ve been privileged to encounter some beautiful creatures on my travels, but I needn’t always travel to far flung places to spot some equally as interesting little fellows. Like the mice that live around the tracks in the London underground system. Vermin they may be, but they’re just as pretty in their own way as those other unwanted visitors that we saw at a house in California; hummingbirds on a garden feeder “They’re a pest really, just like the deer that eat my orchids”, said our host. Truth is, we don’t get many of either in my garden, but I agreed. I was a guest after all.
Back home there were the aforementioned fox cubs, still clad in their infant black, rolling in the early morning dew, and the hare leaping madly about in a bunker at my local golf course. The same course is also home to the kestrel who sat in a tree watching over me as I putted out on the seventeenth green. I took three attempts, but eventually my golf ball disappeared into the hole, and all the while I could imagine this beautiful bird thinking, “If only I could hollow that big lad out, me, the wife and the chicks would be sorted right through to spring”.
There’s a kingfisher that darts around a local pond, all shining flashes of orange
and blue, and on one stunning occasion a sparrowhawk in my very own garden, plummeting
into my privet hedge and causing the sparrows that call the hedge home to explode
out of it in a life-
I’ve had a pheasant tempting fate by making itself at home on my brick barbecue pit,
and spent a ludicrously happy hour watching a swan land on a frozen canal. Well,
he tried to land, but his weight broke through the ice, making a little swan-
One of my favourite times of year has become our annual badgerwatch. For the last seven autumns my Beloved and I have booked the same cabin in the Lake District. It’s not a particularly romantic cabin, not a five star experience by any means, but it does have one thing going for it; it backs onto a wood which contains a thriving badger den. We always live up to our part of the bargain, arriving armed to the teeth with a week’s supply of peanuts and bananas, and the badgers never let us down.
It’s a big world. Hopefully I’ll get to see much more of it and its natural wonders.
Oh, and the elephant? Once we decided that driving under a disused railway bridge might not be such a great idea. The bridge was sturdy enough, sure. But then it would have to be to support the elephant that had chosen that moment to cross it. She stood still for a moment, high above our heads, sniffing the air with her trunk before letting out a little trumpet. What she meant by it I couldn’t say. I didn’t mind her passing comment on our being there so much as her passing water. She let go in a huge stream, straight down through the old iron bridge onto the road in front of us, before steadily plodding on her way. We, naturally, gave it a few minutes...
© 2010 Shaun Finnie