Lichen hunting with an ornithologist

A couple of weeks ago we made a brief visit to the Scottish Highlands to visit an old friend. It was a mildly eventful trip with one day spent clearing out  a neighbour's drains to stop flood water coming into her house and another spent walking 10 miles or so back to Inverness along the Great Glen Way. En route we stopped at the Abriachan eco cafe where I happened to mention to the woman who runs it that one of my companions on my first trip to the Highlands had spent most of his time photographing Lichen. Hearing this she took me to see some particularly fine specimens in the woods nearby.

I love the way in which the sheer variety of shapes and forms creates an entire world in miniature. Another old friend used to be a railway modeller and one of the dafter things we did was pretend that the 19th Century Act of Parliament giving permission to extend the railway line up Wharfedale ( down in Yorkshire this time) from Grassington to Kettlewell had actually been acted upon and so, as well as surveying the route for ourselves, he constructed a model of the station in Kettlewell that never was as it might have been in 1926. He used lichen to model trees and bushes and grey wool to knit dry stone walls.

Now the odd thing about this Highland trip was that nowadays it would probably never have happened. The photographer was the senior maths teacher at our secondary school and we were the only two students studying further maths at A level. The whit holiday just before our final exams he simply asked us if we'd like to accompany him on a camping trip up to Scotland and for some reason we agreed. My companion saw it as a chance to go bird spotting along the north coast - Eider Duck, Great Northern Divers, Purple Herons and the rest - and I think that I simply saw it as a distraction from the revision which everybody said we ought to be doing but which we obviously weren't (In maths and physics, if you've worked out what's going on when you do it, which is the point, then there really isn't that much revision to do. My main preparation for exams was not going out to the pub the night before) So, we spent a week driving around the Highlands, stopping to take photographs and stare at birds through binoculars, camping at night in an old fashioned single ridge tent and neither of us, nor our families, questioned the propriety of this trip at all. Oh, such days of innocence.

What prompted this post, however, wasn't the recent trip to Scotland but a slide shown at a presentation I attended earlier this week. I'd got myself invited to the North Yorkshire Healthy Weight Forum being held far across the County in Ripon. This was partly so that I could meet some of the people involved in the County's public health team, and gently harass them about physical inactivity, and partly so that I could visit my elderly parents, who live nearby. The slide was shown by someone from an organisation called More Life. In essence what they do is run camps for overweight children where they get them moving and encourage a healthier diet. The slide was of the camp venue.

Blow me, as in "you could blow me down with a feather", if it wasn't the front building of my old school and if it wasn't the very building where, for my fellow student, mathematics and ornithology fought a desperate battle for his attention.

Because there were only two of us sitting these particular exams we were put in an upstairs room on the right hand side of this building with a view out across the school grounds and, crucially, a side view of the flanking extension at the side. At that time of year House Martins were busy nesting along the eaves. So, get on with your sums or watch the birds? An easy call for me but a very hard one for my companion who even I could tell was thoroughly distracted throughout.

40 years on I believe that he now lives and breathes bird life on an island off the North West coast of Norway while I piss around in Scarborough.