John Sturgis

At the risk of sounding like Sid James in some late period Carry On, I currently have two birds on the go. One in the garden, one at the allotment, both real beauties — both robins. I’m smitten and I suspect I’m not alone. With much of the nation either working from home or on actual gardening leave, robins have become more familiar than ever. Most species of garden birds are horribly in decline (around 60 per cent of house sparrows, for instance, have been lost since the mid-1970s), but the robin has stubbornly stuck around in great numbers. While those other great survivors, magpies and pigeons, are brash and ungainly, the robin is a delicate little gem: magpie song is shrill, pigeon dumbly repetitive, but robin chirrups are a delight.

There's an old joke from the nineties: The A1 walks into a bar. The barman says ‘Are you with him?’ and nods in the direction of the C1. ‘I'm not going near him,’ the A1 replies. ‘He's a cyclepath.’ Ho ho, how quaint – combining the novel idea of cycle lanes with the un-PC evocation of ‘psychos’. I mention this because the government's big non-Covid idea this autumn, the so-called ‘Green Industrial Revolution’, contains a key provision ‘to make our towns' and cities' cycle lanes worthy of Holland.' I broadly think this is a very good thing – as long as they don't waste any more money building tokenistic ones.