Saturday 14 September 2019

The Lapland and "Victor Meldrew"

The reason why we have the title of this post will be revealed at the end of this post. On Friday 13th September, after work I drove to Caister and decided to park in Tan Lane to avoid the extortionate £1 per hour parking charges in the car park by the Lifeboat station. I parked carefully in a road with no parking restrictions and didn't block any drives (my Room 101 pet hate!) I walked over and saw Chris from Dereham coming back, he'd seen the bird but more importantly he gave me directions of exactly where the bird had been seen 400 yards north of the Lifeboat station, by the burnt area by the edge of the golf course. There was no sign for an hour on the golf course I saw 3 Wheatears which then flew over to the Dunes area but Terry B (really nice to see Terry hadn't seen him for several years) arrived and almost immediately a small brown bird that probably wasn't a Skylark flew up from the path and flew about 20 metres north appearing to land on the path further along. I looked down the path and it was clearly the excellent Lapland Bunting. We took a circular arc around and viewed the other side of the bush where it showed well and often down to about 15 metres away. It fed along the path and hoped away, Terry then left and I spent some time watch this charming bird. It fed on seed which had fallen from some vegetation. Then Chris arrived again and we saw the bird for a while before it flew north further along the path at which point I left Chris watching the bird. I then went back to the car. As I walked back, a chap walked out of his house and got in his car parked just further along from me (there was several spaces slightly further along by the kerbside which had no parked cars and he then put his reverse lights on, but didn't move back. I thought this was a bit odd, so I then moved off and turned round further up the road and left and later found a note on the car stating "HOW MANY PARKING SPACES DO YOU NEED (underline underneath this aggressive statement followed by) PARK IN YOUR OWN ROAD.") Truly a Victor Meldrew moment, I think I had unwittingly got involved in parking wars amongst neighbours!

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