Swifts arced through the skies over our Barnes home as I celebrated my seventy-fifth birthday today. There were far fewer than I saw in Madrid a few weeks back, but they remain my favourite bird – even if they haven’t yet taken advantage of the swift boxes we put up as part of re-roofing project a couple of years back
Very striking to see how the number of birthday cards has shrunken over the years, to be replaced by a blizzard of email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp messages from around the world. And amazing, too, to see how any birthday with 10, 25 or 50 in it triggers the best in other people, if not always the recipient.
Plenty of those online messages asked what we were doing to celebrate – and I suspect my answer surprised many. Peter Byck came for lunch with his family, hotfoot from Phoenix, Arizona. I am attending the London premiere in Soho tomorrow for his new 4-part docu-series on regenerative farming, Roots So Deep. I covered his work on “Carbon Cowboys” recently via my Substack channel. And in the afternoon they recorded an interview for his forthcoming, The Peter Byck Show.
By way of celebrating the launch of my latest book, Tickling Sharks, I also posted a Substack article reflecting on. what I learned from the process of writing it. Along the way, I mentioned the fact that it was some sort of milestone birthday – and was promptly bombarded by global goodwill. I might do this again : )
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