I drove up to the "local" moors a day or two ago .... but when I got up there I found the usual parking areas were blocked off and there were notices all along the roadsides telling motorists not to park. I drove along for a few miles, looking for somewhere I could park, but they were all effectively shut. So I turned round and went home. I was many many many miles away from the Winter Hill etc fires ... but I can understand why they were doing it. Maybe it would have been helpful to have signs a few miles before you had bothered to slog up the blasted twisty-turny steep roads ... but no. That's management doing their jobs again eh? But..... but .... me, being a law-abiding citizen, I did as I was told.But on the way back I noticed that lots of other cars + people had parked their cars , and were leaving their engines running, wandering around, and maybe later they would be having a fag and setting up barbecues and the like. Who knows ? In our household we have a name for this .... " Railings Round the Park" When we lived in Liverpool for a while we used to go for long walks in the evening. .... no car then. Often we would go past a big park.... with spiky railing all round it. And it would be locked. That, of course, was to keep all those nasty trouble-making vandals and gits out. But actually it did the exact opposite ... the park was crammed with all the gits and shits .... but all us "nice, law-abiding" types were stuck outside. They could run riot in there totally freely. We could hear all sort of racket and god-knows-what going on in there. Those spiky railings round the park did the exact opposite of their intended purpose. All the prats could and did go over them, but normal, peacefully-going-for-a-walk-people didn't. And in the same way, those notices up in the moors were doing the exact opposite to what they were intended to do ... all the irresponsible shits just parked there anyway,with their barbecues and fags and engines running and all of us ordinary, harmless types were kept away..... so they were completely unobserved and totally safe. Yes, that all worked well then ! This "railings round the park" effect is going on in all sorts of scenarios ... I'm sure you can all see the relevance of all this to a lot of what us birders do.... we sometimes find ourselves excluded from areas in which we would do no harm. But we can't help noticing that plenty of much dodgier people go there without any noticeable consequences. There's a lot of illegal off-road driving going on these days, which I hope we won't do, but but lots of halfwits will, endangering us in the process. And now you know about the "railings-round-the-park" phenomenon, you'll spot it all over the place. If you have any juicy examples, you could tell me about it ... [email protected] (or as a comment) Here's a jolly sort of video to counteract my grumbly stuff up there ... and hey, maybe there's a bird or two to spot .... you never know ...
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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