Set on a course to never give up

True. The event last night did not quite go as fantasised. My ecstasy in a wood.

To explain, you non-followers of such things, it is prime nightingale tweet-tweet time here in eastern England, and I am driven by this powerful fantasy of catching this sodding bird in a full-throated sing song after dark.

The pure sound of this bird will be intense and magical, as promised.

Of course it isn't. It leaves me traumatised in the middle of nowhere at the isolated and rural Bradfield Woods close to midnight, with a terrified Squirrel hanging off my arm because we have set off the security lighting at the remote Visitor's Centre and the dogs are barking. Possibly distant, but maybe getting closer with each insistent woof.

The owl doesn't help. It is one of those sounds that is, basically, a woman screaming. Maybe she is a real live banshee, and she screeches I'm coming to get you over the tree tops, which incidentally are rustling with menace and threat. Or that is what it all now seems, and so far the evening's intense and beautiful pleasure hasn't been assisted by the fact there is a lonely parked Volvo in the car park, and it isn't ours.

Obviously, thanks to Shark's whispered suggestion as we are blindly stumbling along a track in the pitch black with one torch between us, the other car belongs to the murderer. They routinely prowl these lonely Suffolkscapes after midnight, strewing the dismembering limbs of victims in sacrifice under the coppicing. I do not suggest that aloud, but Squirrel hears it anyway.

It all fails, of course it does, because the nightingales are not that stupid they can't hear us coming from ten miles away, but I shall be back next year with another attempt, never fear about that.

However, not all is lost. I take the children in daylight to the lovely gravel pits at Lackford Lakes, where I can spend a few hours, before returning to normal life, staring at this bush.

The other twitchers are most helpful. Although don't think of me as a twitcher, not at all. I will only say that one day I shall suspend this blog, come and live in Suffolk all summer, and bring binoculars, which I shall claim I only hold to spy on the neighbours.