EastEnders

<- Click image for EastEnders website.

Finally, I have decided to come out of the closet to admit that I am a huge fan of the BBC soap EastEnders which explores life, love and tragedy in the fictional London borough of Walford. I have hardly missed a single episode since the show was first launched in February 1985. Smatarse critics who never watch the soap will often claim that it is "dour", "grim" or "morbid" - "No one ever laughs or smiles". This is all utter balderdash! Long ago, Shakespeare discovered that the best theatrical drama will emerge from life's trials and tribulations and not from those times when everything goes along quite swimmingly. I think the writers are generally good at mixing things up with Jim and Dot often seeming like Albert Square's answer to Andy Capp and Flo while The Millers echo Roald Dahl's "The Twits". This is a truly brilliant soap but you have to live with it week by week to really appreciate it as it moves between dramatic highpoints and bread and butter lows - necessary to meld the soap's ongoing major themes and issues together. I say - Stuff the Critics! Come on Walford! And thanks to the brilliant EastEnders team who have given me so much armchair pleasure these last twenty years!

Birds

Collective nouns are fascinating. Who knows where some of their origins lie? For birds, the vocabulary is particularly groovy. Here are just a few choice collective nouns. Next time you are in the English countryside, watch out for murmurations of starlings or a bouquet of pheasants! And you never know – you might witness a mutation of thrushes:-

Choughs - chattering
Coots - commotion
Crows - murder
Eagles - convocation
Finches - charm
Geese - chevron (when flying in V-formation), flock (when on the ground), gaggle (when on water), skein (when flying), string, wedge (when flying)
Guillemot - loomery
Gulls - colony, skein (when flying high over long distances)
Magpies - mischief
Oystercatchers - parcel
Owls - parliament
Pheasants - bouquet
Ravens - unkindness
Redwing - crowd
Sparrows - host, tribe
Starlings - murmuration
Stork - mustering
Thrushes - mutation
Turkeys - rafter
Turtle doves - pitying
Woodpeckers - descent
Wrens - herd, chime

Dawn

It's happened again. Fell asleep in front of the TV, woke up at 3am, went to bed, tossed and turned for forty minutes and then got up for a mug of tea and biscuits and a bit of Internet surfing. Today's the day of the Live8 concerts around the world. I'd like to be down in Hyde Park, London for the music and the sense of being in a huge band of people - united against big business and pompous governments, united for the poor and the disdavantaged - our brothers and our sisters. I admire Bob Geldof greatly for his bloodymindedness, for having the audacity to rediscover People Power. It was there in 1985 at the Live Aid concerts. I cuddled my baby son and felt a shiver of hope as I realised what Geldof and his followers had done. That beautiful innocence, that harnessing of revolutionary tactics, turning smug and self-obsessed musical heroes into proponents of social and political change. What a trick to pull! Cynically, I don't think we will ever make poverty history but that does not mean we should not try. We owe it to our planet. We owe it to our children and their children. We owe it to Africa and to all those other places where need and want cry out like sirens in the night.