Autumn. Not much sign yet of mists, but mellow fruitfulness aplenty. A change in the leaves and the air. You can’t stop the seasons, and the times, from changing.

There’s an irony in Bob Dylan, at 76, still touring relentlessly, still singing The Times They Are A-Changin’, a song he debuted 54 years ago. The real irony is, it’s still true:

“Come gather round, people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown...”

He may have meant it figuratively in 1963 – in 2017 it’s literal truth. For the afflicted thousands in Texas, certainly. Even more so for the millions in Bangladesh. One of the world’s most densely people countries, now largely under water. A human catastrophe on a far greater scale than the disaster in Houston.

Yet which have you heard and seen more about? No change there, then. Calamities in the USA are always much bigger news than calamities in poorer countries. We can expect plenty more of both.

The appalling monsoon floods in Bangladesh, India and Nepal are a catastrophe no less devastating to the lives of its victims for having been entirely predictable, and indeed predicted. By those scientists whose science some entirely unqualified people still insist on denying.

The time for arguing about climate change – whether it’s happening, whether it’s man-made – is long over. It’s time – long past time – to start dealing with the effects. Urgently.

And there’s another change I have to report. This was my last column for the Eastern Daily Press. My four-year run in Norfolk’s morning paper is over, which means this blog too will become less regular and probably less frequent.

EDP readers won’t hear from me – as they might have – about the extraordinary life of the fulmar. For that uplifting story, full of adventurous travels, they will have to consult Adam Nicholson’s wonderful book The Seabird’s Cry.

I won’t be there in print to analyse the end of the surreal Trump presidency or the shambolic May premiership.

I won’t be there to pick apart the law of unintended consequences. How Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the worldwide web enabled a new era of global empire. How Google, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon rapidly became the new world superpowers, wreaking destruction upon traditional journalism, retail and other industries in the course of acquiring powers no mere emperor or national government has ever wielded.

If anyone is to report in those pages on how much of East Anglia will be permanently flooded, and how soon, it will have to be someone else. I won’t be the one to reveal there what plans there may be to prevent Sizewell from becoming another Fukushima when the sea erodes the cliff it stands on. As it will.

Not having to write all these things may mean I sleep better. Now perhaps I shall discover whether it’s the business of composing a weekly column, and hoping I remember my words of wisdom until morning, that keeps me awake at night. Or whether that’s just what I do to amuse myself while not sleeping.

And there’s this interesting idea to add to my recent piece on insomnia. It may be a matter not of modern life but of evolution.

In primitive communities it’s good if there’s always someone awake. Someone in the group alert to danger, whether from wild beasts, rival tribes, forest fire or flood. Rather like watch duty on board ship. Having people awake at different times of night was an evolutionary advantage to our ancestors. So there’s a thought to console you next time you’re trying to go back to sleep in the small hours.

This was my parting shot to my EDP readers, borrowed from an old friend’s translation of an even older Chinese or Japanese poet. (Li Po, perhaps? I forget. He was dying; I’m not.)

“It is goodbye.
Over the hills I go today,
so, happy am I.”

I was sitting in my garden, watching white clouds scud across a bright blue sky, when I was struck by a familiar thought – and an unwelcome earworm.

Bees were buzzing in the borage, a greenfinch was calling somewhere, scents of mint and fennel mingled. And with them came the almost inevitable melancholy of late summer.

A sense of how wonderful life is – in the senses both of something very, very good and something to be wondered at. And at the same time, how unlikely, and how fragile.

The random coherence of this little planet’s precise conditions. Its particular, narrow temperature range – not too hot and not too cold. Its wateriness – and the remarkable fact that water gets lighter, not heavier, when it freezes, so that ice floats. Its relationship with the moon, which causes tides. The odd angle of the Earth’s axis, which gives us seasons. The annihilation of the dinosaurs, which allowed mammals to thrive and develop. A breathable atmosphere. Rain. The atomic structure of carbon, and other elements.

All these and a great many other favourable chances were essential to the emergence and evolution of life – at least as we know it. And now, for the first time (as far as we know) one species has developed to the point where it’s capable of putting the whole thing at risk.

Whatever insanity humankind gets up to, it won’t be the end of the world. It probably won’t even be the end of life on Earth. But it could be the end of us, and with us most of the other life we know or care about.

So we’d better enjoy and cherish those birds, bees, herbs and trees while we still can.

And that unwanted earworm – the quotation I’ve used as a headline on this piece? It’s unwelcome largely because I don’t want to think about the foul human being who wrote and sang it.

A man whose writing and singing I once enjoyed and now can’t listen to. Whose CDs have disappeared from my collection, and whose videos have disappeared from every music TV channel. Ian Watkins, late of the rock band Lostprophets, now resident of Rye Hill jail, four years into a 35-year sentence for various depraved acts against young children.

The case has been raised again because of police failings that allowed him to go on harming infants long after he should have been banged up. And it raises again the old question of whether it’s possible – or even moral – to enjoy artworks created by immoral people.

How, for example, can I go on listening to Metallica even though their lead singer, James Hetfield, is a supporter of America’s insane gun laws? A man who gets his kicks from killing wild creatures. A man, in short, whose actions and worldview I find abhorrent.

It’s a good question, and one I sometimes struggle with.

How is it I can enjoy the music of Carl Orff – said to be Hitler’s favourite composer – but can’t abide Wagner?
I think the answer in each case lies in the works themselves.

There is nothing inherently Hitlerian, or offensive in any way, in Orff’s masterpiece Carmina Burana. Unless you object to its use in selling aftershave.

Wagner, on the other hand, was not merely an anti-Semite but wove a romantic, bombastic mythology of Germanic superiority right through his work. You could argue that without Wagner there’d have been no Hitler, that his work was Nazi before the term was coined.

And, sadly, there’s no escaping the fact that what I once thought were Lostprophets’ best songs are imbued with Watkins’s twisted sense of fun. His perverted glee in what he saw as “getting away with it”.

Knowing what one knows now, many of his lyrics take on deeply unpleasant meanings. My once favourite, Town Called Hypocrisy, reeks of – yes, hypocrisy.

By the time he came up with that song I began with, his last almost-hit, he probably could see the end of his personal world coming. And none too soon.

Is the exit of Steve Bannon from the White House staff a sign, as some have suggested, that we are reaching end game for the Trump presidency? Or is that just wishful thinking?

I was hardly alone in believing Trump couldn’t last seven weeks in the job, let alone seven months. Yet here he still is, while his aides keep falling like discarded, broken playthings.

When Bannon himself said it was the end of the presidency, it turned out he only meant that the more aggressive decision-making might now be toned down.

While Trump waved Bannon bye-bye (via Twitter, of course), with this thumbs-up for his right-wing propaganda website Breitbart News: “Fake News needs the competition!” As if Trump was capable of distinguishing fake from real.

With so much misunderstanding and misinformation trotting out on the information super-highway, it can be hard even for a grown-up to tell the thoroughbred from the pantomime donkey.

Is this life itself the real thing, or are we just a simulation created in some greater being’s experiment or game? Who can say for sure?

We’ve grown used to remarkably convincing CGI mammoths and dinosaurs wandering into our wildlife documentaries. And now with Sky Sports, “home of the Premier League”, also broadcasting an “Interactive World Cup” – football simulations played on PlayStation and Xbox – the line between real and pretend is getting very sketchy indeed.

Not that news, or reality, have ever been precisely what they seemed.

On the southern fringe of the French Alps lies the beautiful lake of Serre-Ponçon. It’s a favourite with windsurfers, kayakers, wild swimmers, sailors of small boats. But is it really a lake? It wasn’t there until the late 1950s, when a mighty 123-metre high dam was thrown across the Durance river.

As well as water sports, it powers 16 hydroelectric plants and provides irrigation to a huge area of land. Several villages were drowned in its creation, including one whose cemetery still stands at the water’s edge while the buildings lie beneath the ripples.

There’s a great photo of the village priest of Savines, seen from behind, watching his old church being dynamited in about 1959. It’s a brilliant composition and a brilliant piece of timing by a local newspaper photographer.

But is that really the priest, as his dress and his pose suggest? Who knows? It’s a great piece of story-telling about a real event anyway.

As is another shot from the same paper – surely staged – of an old woman washing clothes at the traditional outdoor village laundry while a massive concrete bridge towers high above her, still under construction.

As it happens, I know that bridge. I’ve crossed it several times. The roadway is just a few metres above the surface of the lake. You’d never guess how deep its legs reach under the water.

The flooding of those villages sounds like a classic modern tragedy. But then there’s this.

The dam and the lake were first proposed in 1856 – not for sport or power, but to save the villagers, and others further downstream, from any repeat of the devastating floods of that year and 13 years earlier. Nothing in this story is not exactly as it first seems.

Now there’s the worldwide web – a wonderful, unprecedented storehouse of information, but one in which it can be all but impossible to sort the good from the dodgy. The matter-of-fact from the well-meant wrong-end-of-the-stick. Or worse.

A photo made it onto the front page of a respected US newspaper last week showing a protester savagely beating a fallen police officer. Or that’s what the caption claimed it showed. It went viral online.

In fact the picture was several years old. It had been cropped to remove the evidence that it was actually taken in Greece, not Virginia. The anti-fascist logo on the attacker’s jacket had been added digitally. Faked news.

I wish I could unsee the picture of a dog, apparently skinned alive, which cropped up in my social media feed last week. Very grisly, very upsetting. But was it quite what it seemed? There were small clues that it might not have been been – surely there should have been more blood if the poor animal had really been alive. Or is that just wishful thinking again?

The purpose of those who posted it was to gather shocked “signatures” for an online petition. A worthy cause, no doubt, but does it do any good in the real world to heap up names in this way?

Great claims are sometimes made for such petitions as democracy in action. But I suspect they have become merely a modern form of prayer. An appeal to a distant higher authority. An expression of wishes. Something to make you feel better by giving you the illusion of doing something when there’s nothing you can do.

Now let us pray – and sign petitions – for the US to change its gun laws, to scrap its nuclear arsenal, and to stop waging war.

We all know by now that many times more Americans are shot dead by small children than are killed or wounded in terrorist attacks. That simple fact, at least, is not fake news.

Putting guns in the hands of infants is a very poor idea. And right now we have two tired toddlers – Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un – stropping around the world playground with very big guns indeed. It’s high time their toys were taken away.                                                                                                             

How did you sleep last night? It’s a question we tend to ask those close to us – and ourselves – rather a lot. And it sometimes seems as if our whole society has got obsessed with the subject.

Of course, we all do it. Sleep, that is. For most of most nights in most cases. And – I speak here for all the grown-ups among us – we probably all worry about how much we’re not getting as well.

Obviously, sleep’s good for us, even if no one can really tell us exactly why. Equally obviously, to be deprived of sleep is bad for us. There’s a reason why it’s used as a torture – sorry, “extreme interrogation” – technique.

It makes you feel lousy. It clouds your judgement and slows your reaction times, as bad for your driving, apparently, as drinking too much. It causes irritability, anxiety, headaches and weight gain, because it makes us give in to a craving for the wrong kinds of food.

But for all that I have a sneaky feeling we may all be worrying about it just a little too much.

Do we really need to spend eight hours a night in the Land of Nod, as people keep telling us? That’s a whole third of your life unconscious. Don’t we have anything more interesting to do?

Well, yes, we do. Like watching yet another panel game or alleged reality show on the box. Or keeping up on Facebook and Instagram with all those good mates we’ve never met in the real world. Or knocking back another pint and another round of jokes with our actual flesh-and-blood mates.

Ah yes, but there’s the problem. Alcohol may knock you out, but it can disrupt your sleep too – and there’s nothing like a full bladder for waking you up in the wee small hours.

And telly, computer or smartphone all come with a double whammy. It can be hard to switch your mind off, to disconnect. And then there’s the blue tone in the light from the screen, which mimics the light of day and fools your brain into thinking it’s time to be up and doing, not closing down for the night.

Or so telly doc Michael Mosley was telling me recently, an hour or two after my bedtime.

His best piece of advice seemed to be to read a boring book. Something about sleep, perhaps. There do seem to be a lot out there – another sure sign of our fixation. Not all of them as worthy, heavy or usefully dull as “The Mystery of Sleep”, by Meir Kryger.

To be fair to the venerable doctor and professor, there’s quite a lot in the book – subtitled “Why a Good Night’s Rest is Vital to a Better, Healthier Life” – to get wakefully interested in. Especially if you’re a GP, a neurologist or a student of dreams.

The trouble is, the mystery referred to in the title remains just that – a mystery. And the best advice he offers is all the usual stuff. Plus not letting a dog or cat share your bedroom, and kicking your partner out into another room if they snore. Which seems harsh to me.

Oh, and not allowing yourself a long lie-in at weekends. Which does make a kind of sense, even if it seems a tad counterintuitive at first.

But eight hours a night? Really? They say that’s what people got in days or yore, but frankly I don’t believe it.
I haven’t had that much on a regular basis since I was a kid. And while I like my bed, I reckon you can get too hung up on how long you spend there.

In my experience nothing keeps you awake worse than worrying about not sleeping. That, and composing blog posts like this one in my head.

“Now that,” I thought as I sped past, “is something you don’t see very often any more.”

“That” was a couple of hitch-hikers standing by the roadside with their thumbs out hopefully. I’d have stopped for them if they hadn’t been in such a stupid place – too near a bend to see them in time or to pull over safely.
I hope they got a decent lift eventually, but I wouldn’t give much for their prospects just there. Even if many drivers were still in the habit of giving lifts to strangers, which they obviously aren’t.

Those particular hitchers can’t have been much in the habit either, or they’d have found themselves a more likely stopping place, just past a junction and in good view. But then, who is in the habit these days?

There are no doubt lots of reasons for the decline of hitching as a means of getting around the country. The apparently growing fear of strangers is surely one. (There’s another column, if not a book, to be written on that subject.) The “improvement” of the road system is certainly another.

Back in the not-so-bad old days of the 1970s I made many journeys up and down the A1 by thumb. It was how I made most of my trips between uni and home. Not so easy now.

Nearly all the old roundabouts, which provided the perfect pick-up and set-down places, have gone, replaced by fast straights and slip-roads with nowhere to stand or stop.

Just occasionally, that gave problems back in my hitching heyday. I was once dropped on the A1/M18 intersection in a place where my presence on foot was illegal. I’d barely alighted from the truck that wasn’t going my way before a car stopped and the driver leaned over and opened the door for me.

“I don’t normally pick up hitchers,” he said, “but I thought you’d rather me than the police.” A little over 100 miles and a good conversation later, he dropped me at the end of my street.

That was a key thing about hitching. Most of the people you’d meet were nice, most conversations good. And you’d come across a variety of people, often truckers, sometimes commercial travellers (usually the scariest drivers). Sometimes more surprising encounters.

I once made a good part of the southward journey in a huge removal van on its way to France. The client was a diplomat and the whole van was designated a “diplomatic bag”. The driver offered me a free, unchecked ride to Paris – which might have been fun, except I’d then have been stuck in France with no passport. And not much money, either, in those pre-ATM days of travellers’ cheques.

On one of the rare bad hitching days I ended up at midnight in an almost deserted service station still 50-odd miles from home. I was sitting over a mug of tea wondering what to do when a police patrol rolled in for a cuppa. After checking me out, the cops instructed the next lorry-driver who called in to take me home. Which he did.

On another occasion I was set down near Newark by an officer in an Army staff car. “Sorry, I know this isn’t a good place,” he told me. “If you’re still here in about an hour, I’ll get a truck to pick you up.”

Which is how a long-haired student came to roll into Catterick at the head of a military convoy. Not sure that would happen now. It seemed unlikely enough back then.

It was at Catterick another time that I had one of those strange “what if” moments. I was offered a ride in a white Mercedes convertible by a very glamorous blonde woman in short skirt and sunglasses. Did I imagine that, or make it up? I don’t think so. My fantasies aren’t usually such ridiculous clichés. But she wasn’t going my way anyway.

Two days after the assassination of the US president in November 1963, the great Alistair Cooke sat down as every week to read his Letter From America to BBC radio listeners. “By now,” he began, “it may be impossible to add any sensible or proper words to all the millions that have been written or spoken about the life and cruel death of John F Kennedy.”

Two days, millions of words – and I don’t doubt Cooke was being literally accurate. How many more millions have been written on the subject since? But that most urbane and percipient broadcaster did have sensible and proper words to add – of course.

Among them was a comparison of the huge hopes that attended Kennedy’s election in 1960 with the actual disappointment of his three years in office.

“Many thoughtful men,” Cooke said, “were beginning to wonder if the president’s powers were not a mockery of his office, since he can be thwarted from getting any laws passed at all by the obstruction of a dozen chairmen of Congressional committees.”

The Obama administration followed much the same trajectory – minus, thankfully, the bullet in Dallas. Unrealistically high hopes, unfairly bitter disappointment.

And now we have the mirror image. No presidency of my lifetime has begun in such fear and disbelief as the present one. And all those people who spent eight years bemoaning that Obama seemed unable to get anything done are now thanking the deity of their choice that the same constraints apply to Trump.

So the president fails to scrap the health care provisions granted to his citizens by the Affordable Care Act (so-called Obamacare). Three Republican senators say No to the Donald and 22million ordinary Americans, many of them Trump voters, breathe a sigh of relief.

And here’s a statistic worth thinking about for a moment. There are an estimated 2,500 transgender personnel serving the US armed forces.

This demonstrates two things. That there are more transgender people out there than you might have thought. And that there are an awful lot of people – of all kinds except, presumably, pacifists – in the US military.

It’s probably not a statistic Trump knew when he issued his infamous tweet about not “accepting or allowing” transgender people to serve. He may know better now, unless his butterfly brain has merely flitted on to something else.

Like so many of the Twitterer-in-chief’s ill-thought-out tweets, this one certainly set the cat among the pigeons. But I don’t think the pigeons really need worry too much. This cat may miaow viciously but it has no real claws. A tweet may reveal the president’s bigotry but it doesn’t amount to policy.

A man with rather more gravitas than Trump is General Joseph Dunford. As chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, he is the highest ranking officer in the US forces and the chief military adviser to the White House.

And his official response to the infamous tweet included these words: “There will be no modification to the current policy… We will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect.”

I have, admittedly, taken out the words “until” and “in the meantime” from Dunford’s announcement. His role requires him to be diplomatic. But the direction of travel is still pretty clear.

This latest off-the-cuff twitch of the presidential forefinger is no more likely to become law than Kennedy’s abandoned tax reforms. Or JFK’s plan to provide care for the elderly, which had to wait 50 years for Obama to implement something like it.

The real danger of Trump may not really be in anything he says or tweets. It may be that the constant clown show draws attention away from whatever the real politicians in Washington are up to.

It comes in a neat box about eight inches high, bearing the catchy name “kitchen tool like bottle”. Eight implements in one handily small package. Just the thing for a teenager preparing for a self-catering life in student accommodation.

But what are these useful tools? Knife, spoon, tin-opener, peeler, grater? None of those. And while there is something described as a Bottle Opener, it’s actually a rubber ring to help you grasp a jar.

A thirsty student would struggle to open their beer bottle with that. With or without the guidance note: “Grasp bottle cap by covering it on bottle cap when using.” Or the further warning that if pulled or folded it “may not recover because of once deformation”.

There’s a Seasoning Grinder. And if you’re wondering what that is, “It is used for triturating seasoning such as ginger, horseradish and etc.” Useful.

There’s something that looks reassuringly like a standard lemon-squeezer. “Its shape is designed reasonably in order to squeeze better.”

The shape of the funnel is designed to “look like bottle”. But as it says on the box: “In that way it is relatively convenient to use powered substance and combine with weighing cup used as a little vase as an open mouth is relatively spacious”.

By this point in reading the instructions, my open mouth is certainly relatively spacious. And no powered substances required.

But about that Weighing Cup (no weighing machine provided): “It with degree scale is used for weighing a small amount of things. It is used by combining with each component and also used as a vessel.”

I can see it might combine usefully with the Cheese Grinder: “Please follow direction of arrow to triturate food material when using it.” I will, I will.

Frankly, I’ve never felt the need of an Egg Pulverizator. I’m not even sure what one is – but fortunately there’s an explanation: “It is used for triturating seasoning such as ginger, horseradish and etc.” So that’s clear, then. Or at least familiar.

Lastly – and the need for this is beyond me as well – there’s what can only be called Utensil for Taking Yolk. And that, apparently, is all the explanation you need.

You will, of course, have realised by now that this little bundle of plastic contrivances, like so many useful objects in our lives, especially the plastic sort, was Made in China. That wonderful far-off country where so much of our language too is pulverizated.

And I’m not mocking. Really, I’m not. My grasp of Chinese languages goes no further than being able to identify the winds and dragons on a set of mah-jong tiles. I mean only to express my disappointment at the decision by China’s rulers to clamp down (again) on one of the world’s most reliable sources of inadvertent surrealism.

The government in Beijing has decided that Chinglish is a national embarrassment. From December it aims to enforce new rules ensuring translations “do not contain content that damages the images of China or other countries”.

It will insist all translated signs and labels “prioritise correct grammar and a proper register, while rare expressions and vocabulary words should be avoided”. Good luck with that, then.

Actually, I find it remarkable that the Chinese even attempt English translations of their signage. How many signs in Cantonese do you see on the streets of Norwich?

But if Chinglish is to be cleaned up, we must cherish it while we can. And celebrate signs such as this one, in a public park: “Drug, druger, psychotic is out allowed to enter, miner, senior citizen and disabled man”.

This one by the side of a steep path: “Carefully slipping”.

Or this one, mysteriously in a record shop window: “No Panting!”

And finally, just remember: “Please don’t wipe forcibly words and lines printed each component. Because they may disappear.”

It was not the longest or  most difficult journey to America ever made. Not up there with Christopher Columbus’s original voyage of 1492. Nor the trip my grandmother made as a nine-year-old travelling alone on the lower deck from Russia to New York.

It involved nothing like the horrors endured by migrants desperate enough to risk crossing the Mediterranean in overcrowded, ramshackle boats, perhaps drowning in the attempt. 

Or the dangers faced by those fleeing the wars in Yemen or Syria or the lawlessness that has ensued from Western “involvement” in Libya.

Or the hardships of those who perish trying to cross the desert that makes Donald Trump’s promised wall between the US and Mexico a complete irrelevance for so much of that border.

The trip was not undertaken by a Muslim from any of those Arab states Trump has closed the door on. It was a journey home to Wisconsin by a British man who has lived there legally for years, running a small business with his American wife.

A white, middle-aged, middle-class man with no beard, tattoos or extreme political or religious views. A member, in short, (like me) of a privileged minority. Nevertheless, I think his Odyssey last week is worth recounting for what it says about the world we live in.

Airport-to-airport, it should have taken just under 14 hours. It took 66 – largely for reasons that speak volumes about Trump’s America.

The traveller had been summoned back to England at short notice when his 89-year-old mother was taken into hospital after a heart attack. Happily, against all apparent odds, she returned home and seems to have made a full recovery.

Meanwhile, however, back in Wisconsin Steve’s father-in-law died suddenly and he made a rapid flight booking in hope of being home for the funeral. Vain hope, as it turned out.

It was as he was changing planes in Dublin that the troubles began. US Homeland Security now begins a long way from the homeland – and there was a mix-up over the dates on his travel documents. By the time that was sorted, his booked flight had flown.

Waiting to get on another plane the next morning, he was denied a boarding pass and told he would have to go to the US Embassy to have his Green Card cleared. At the embassy, he was told to send an email. Which he did from an internet cafe around the corner, in a country he’d landed in with no local currency and an inoperative phone. Meanwhile, another flight to Chicago had left – and his father-in-law’s faraway funeral was just hours away.

At this point technical troubles enter the story. Given the all-clear by the immigration authorities, our hero boarded a flight for Chicago, only to sit on the Dublin tarmac for a couple of hours – and then back in the departure lounge for several more – while ground crew fixed an electrical fault on the plane. When eventually he landed in Chicago it was past midnight – the hour at which his clearance granted in Dublin expired.

There are a dozen flights a day from Chicago to Milwaukee. But once he was through another two hours with immigration officials, Steve decided that rather than wait for the day’s air service to begin he’d make the last 90 miles of his trek by taxi. And ran into a Midwest thunderstorm of the kind that brings flooding and road damage...

All first world problems, perhaps. But as his wife remarked: “It’s about immigration in this land that Trump is making so great again. You can see what a fine job he’s doing in making America first.”

Meanwhile Steve’s sister, one of my oldest and dearest friends, has her own related worries. Having lived for 30 years in France with a British passport, she’s now wondering anxiously where Brexit will leave her, her French husband and her French job.

As I sat in the garden enjoying the summer evening sun, my attention was caught by a movement in the bushes. Not this time one of the dunnocks which are our year-round companions, and not big or heavy enough to be just another pigeon or blackbird.

No, it was a blackcap foraging for berries, not in a black cap, but a smart russet brown one befitting her gender. Happily I had my camera to hand, so here she is. I’m very fond of her and her trim, dapper mate.

Most summers for the past decade we’ve had blackcaps for neighbours. They always nest in the same holly bush just beyond our back gate, and I’ve often wondered whether it’s the same pair returning year after year, or perhaps ensuing generations. And, if one was fledged here, whether it was the male or the female returning to its early home.

All of which raises the question: how long do small birds like blackcaps live? And the answer, it turns out, is not entirely straightforward.

Most sources give a typical blackcap lifespan of two years, which might suggest we’ve had several generations of visitors. But then the Animal Ageing and Longevity Database – a great resource to discover – gives a maximum age in the wild of nearly 14. So it seems at least possible that the pair busy in the garden hedge right now are the same two birds I first spotted 10 years ago. Statistically unlikely, perhaps, but certainly plausible.

Because this is the thing about life expectancy: not many creatures die of old age. Most succumb to accident, disease or being eaten by other creatures long before their bodies wear out. Which means those that survive those perils may live many times longer than the average for their kind.

The same statistical pattern used to apply to human beings – and in some parts of the world it still does. Some individuals can live to a ripe old age through wars and grinding poverty. Most won’t, so the average is relatively low.

Which brings me back to the question: what is a ripe old age for a bird?

Of course, it depends on the bird. One wild albatross was ringed on Midway Atoll in the North Pacific in 1956 while incubating an egg. Since the species doesn’t breed before the age of five, she must have been at least 62 when she was spotted again in 2013, rearing another chick.

Some pelicans and an occasional eagle make it into their 50s. Buzzards can reach their late 20s and those red kites now taking to our skies may go well into their 30s.

The oldest recorded dunnock, or hedge sparrow, was 20. The garden warbler – a close relative of my blackcaps – can live to 24 in captivity. And that familiar little charmer the chaffinch has been known to reach 29.

All of which I find fascinating in itself – and I hope you do too. But it should also give us pause to think.

As the most wasteful and destructive species on this planet – by far – we have a responsibility to all those other creatures we share it with. And if we make it uninhabitable for them, even the birds we take for granted are not necessarily easy-come, easy-go, short-lived beings that can quickly bounce back.

The fulmar, that brilliant navigator of the wind currents around our sea cliffs, can live in the wild to at least 51.
I shall write more another time about fulmars, which are truly marvellous birds. For now I’ll just note that scientists believe every grown fulmar in the world – every single one – and every albatross has some plastic in them. Which is just one reason to wonder how many will make it to old age.

Plastic is a magical material. Well, quite a lot of different magical materials, actually. One of the wonders of the modern age. And one of the horrors too.

I wrote here a few weeks ago about photographer and activist Tim Nunn and his campaign to draw attention to the mountains of plastic detritus washing up on distant shores around the world. A true East Anglian hero.
Since then, plastic has hit the headlines for a few different reasons. None of them good.

Perhaps most notably, and most immediately horrifying for humans, the plastic foam insulation in the building’s cladding has been implicated in making a towering inferno of Grenfell Tower. 

Equally shocking in its way was the tale of the whale that died on the Isle of Skye.

The Cuvier’s beaked whale was killed by the 4kg of carrier-bags, bin-liners and freezer bags which had filled its stomach, got twisted in its intestine and blocked its digestive system.

Dr Andrew Brownlow of the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme carried out the autopsy that revealed this sorry cause of death. And he said: “If you assume that what this whale has done is sample a small section of ocean, then this is astonishing. This was an animal that went to places that are very difficult for us to go and sample and sadly paid pretty much the ultimate price for that.”

It is estimated that between eight million and 12m tonnes of plastic are dumped in the sea every year. The gap between those figures reveals a gap in our knowledge of something we really should know – and care – a lot more about. 

But whatever the true total, it’s an awful lot of sea-borne plastic. And for all the global tide of flotsam so graphically recorded by Tim Nunn, most of it sinks below the surface. 

Out of sight of humanity, but straight into the food chain of the whales and countless other marine creatures.

Ultimately, a fair amount will end up in our own food chain. With consequences to our own health which scientists are still a long way from determining for sure. It’s unlikely to prove beneficial.

Meanwhile, the Greenpeace ship Beluga II has just finished a two-month scientific expedition around the coast of Scotland.

Working with various volunteer organisations, including local primary schools, the crew have taken more than 40 seawater samples and conducted 30 beach surveys and clean-ups. The samples are undergoing analysis at Exeter University, but every one appears to contain a great many tiny pieces of plastic.

You can find film taken by the Beluga crew on the Greenpeace UK Facebook page here. It includes footage of awe-inspiring coastal scenery and glorious wildlife – seals, basking sharks, dolphins, puffins, gannets – but also grotesque quantities of plastic.

Even on the remotest isles, the team cleared plastic bottles, bags and packaging from every beach they surveyed. One shot shows a puffin whose already brightly coloured beak is awkwardly augmented with a garish piece of bright green cord.

On spectacular Bass Rock, home to 150,000 gannets – the world’s largest colony of those majestic birds – nesting sites are strewn with discarded plastic of all sorts.

Other researchers report that one in three of the world’s turtles – and an astonishing 90 per cent of all seabirds – have eaten bits of plastic, sometimes with gruesome consequences.

The Beluga team visited the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood last week to present their early findings and hand in a 25,000-name petition calling for a deposit return scheme for bottles and cans. (Remember when it was normal to take empty bottles back rather than chucking them away? Readers of a certain age will.)

And here’s one small piece of good news against the depressing tide. Scotland’s environment secretary Roseanna Cunningham promptly announced a consultation and feasibility study on a national bottle deposit scheme.

It may not be much when the problem’s so huge, but it’s a step in the right direction. We could all take a few steps ourselves to reduce our plastic habit.