2008 - The Bearded Tit by Prefers to remain anonymous, Rory McGrath

passion. This was about the sixth time I’d met up with JJ. Increasingly I was taking over her lunch-hour and her morning and afternoon coffee-breaks. She had taken over my whole life but I hadn’t broken this terrifying news to her just yet. I was playing it as cool as a pathologically uncool person could. I was feeling more relaxed with her, less submissive and dribbling. I’d even said my first critical thing to her, half joking, of course.
    ‘That’s a nice bright skirt you’re wearing!’
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘Sorry? I can’t hear you over the colour of your skirt.’
    ‘Ha ha ha,’ she said. I breathed a huge internal sigh of relief that she understood the feeble joke and was not offended by it. ‘Anyway, it’s a dress, not a skirt.’
    ‘When I used to wear one, I called it a skirt.’
    We hadn’t quite done anything physical yet. Well, I had inadvertently brushed my hand against the side of her left breast when I was reaching over to get a teaspoon. In my mind, I reeled with fear and shame and guilt and embarrassment. Oh no, I’ve grabbed her breast. In public! Out of the blue I’ve lunged at her and grabbed a dirty great handful!
    She either didn’t notice it or thought, quite rightly, it was too insignificant to mention. Oh, and I’d come up with a ruse to get a little more snuggly with her: we’d compared heights.
    ‘You’re quite tall, aren’t you?’ she’d mentioned.
    ‘Average, I’d say. Taller than you. But you’re microscopic. I know—stand up and we’ll compare heights.’
    We stood up and momentarily we were almost touching each other from head to toe. I could feel her warm breath against my chest.
    ‘Er, I don’t think you’re supposed to do this face to face. You don’t get such an accurate comparison.’ She turned round with her back to me. It felt very pleasant.
    ‘I think you’re supposed to turn round as well.’
    Oh, of course. We stood back to back and came to the anticli-mactic conclusion that I was taller than her. And not only that, she was shorter than me. I think that was the sum of comparative height data that could be extracted from the experiment but I had touched her and that, funnily enough, had done nothing to diminish the unutterable utterness of my utter desire for her.
    Her hand was resting on the table very close to my hand. I took a risk. I moved my hand on top of hers. A chaffinch arrived at the next table and started clearing up the crumbs. She moved her hand from under mine and pointed at the bird.
    ‘Hey, that’s very tame for a chaffinch!’
    ‘Yes,’ I agreed. Bloody chaffinch.
    ‘Go on then. What is it? Chaffinch?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I thought you’d learnt them.’
    She was talking about scientific names for birds—how off-putting! And I had made a serious stab at learning them but they definitely weren’t uppermost in my mind at this point.
    ‘Er…oh. Yes, it’s got ‘celebrity’’ or something in it. Er, Celebs something. Coelebs fringilla .’
    ’
    ‘Actually it’s Fringilla coelebs .’
    Well, it had its back to me.’
    Once the commonest bird in Britain and still up there with the frontrunners, certainly still one of the most abundant birds in Europe, and an early winner for newcomers to birdwatching. You’ll see a chaffinch every day. Yes, you will. They perch openly and are less timid than most birds. And they have marvellous plumage. The adult male has a blue-grey head, pink breast, brown back, an olive-green rump and two unmissable bright white wing bars on dark brown to black wings.
    The long loud song, once you learn to recognize it, will seem to be the only thing you ever hear in spring as the male tirelessly attempts to attract a female. The song starts as a slow chirrup, speeding up and getting louder and ending with a long, loud fading note. Some twitchers find it reminiscent of a fast bowler, lumbering up to the crease, getting faster then climaxing with the long pitch of the ball. A better birder