More bird trouble. After the sad tale of The Crow a few months back, I had another reminder of man’s inhumanity to fowl today, when a bird flew into my office window.

            Deep in concentration on the computer, I was switching between roughing out a chapter of a book that may or may not be going somewhere, and over-competitively tackling an online spelling quiz, when the jarring ‘thud’ nearly gave me heart failure.

            There’s no sound quite like it. I knew before turning round that some poor bird had made the rookie error of mistaking the window of my house for more of the outside.

            I didn’t want to turn round and look. That would have meant facing up to a potentially fatal incident and I was doing so well on Hard Spell (which is a BBC children’s word challenge) that rushing to engage with the crisis outside would have threatened my record. And you can’t let those nine-year-old spelling geniuses get the better of you, can you?

            But it was hopeless. My concentration had been fatally punctured when that little beak made contact with the glass, so I hesitated online and came to grief on ‘paraphernalia’ which, in high-end junior spelling terms, is about as easy as they come.

Abandoning the quiz with reluctance, I swivelled round, and looked.

            The little bird wasn’t dead. It was crouching on the window-sill, hyperventilating. It was blinking a lot, too, perhaps the avian equivalent of slapping your forehead and saying ‘D’oh! I can’t believe I just did that - sheesh, hope nobody noticed!’

            Small, brown and quivery, I think the technical name for it is an LBJ - a Little Brown Job. My husband, pillar of the RSPB that he is, would have had it named in several languages by now, not that that would have done it much good. But he could probably have told me whether its cheep was sounding a bit off or not - as things were I was none the wiser whether it was a rattling death-cheep, a piercing cheep of pain or just a common-or-garden, full-out livid cheep.

            I’m no use at identifying birds, possessing a repertoire limited to the likes of robins, puffins and ducks. Oh, and crows. When my daughter pointed out a wee bird in the garden recently and said ‘look at the cute chaffinch!’ I was beyond impressed. Somebody, somewhere, had done something right with that girl and it hadn’t been me.

            Cautiously I stood up and approached the window. The unidentified little bird just sat there. This was not good news. Little birds should fly away when people approach. Its head seemed to be listing at a curious angle too. Concussion. I half-expected to see it perform a full Basil Fawlty faint - straight over, flat on its back, wee leggies in the air. (When I was doing my criminal court training, my fellow trainee Carol and I used to console ourselves that should things ever get really tricky whilst we were standing up in front of the judge, we could pull off the Basil Fawlty Faint - though probably only once in our careers. I’m still saving mine. Must track Carol down to find out if she’s used hers yet).

            Back to the bird. What to do? I could hardly open the window and talk it down off the sill. Meanwhile it was still staring lividly at me, one beady eye at a time. Its head looked as though it could swivel a full 360 degrees and I didn’t know if that was normal or not.

            “Sorry, little birdie!”

            An apology. Like that was going to do any good. And anyhow, wasn’t there contributory negligence on the part of the bird? But I really did say that. “Sorry, little birdie!”

            After a few more tense moments, the bird swivelled its head to look at me, blinked - or possibly winked, which is a far nicer thought - and flew away. I was glad, though still worried about residual damage: hairline fractures, whiplash, memory loss and the like. If it’s daft enough to do it again I’ll know there’s been some lasting harm done - though unless it’s a penguin next time, how will I know if it’s the same bird?

There’s a saying that goes: ‘you should never meet your heroes’.

But I think whoever made it up just picked the wrong ones.

I didn’t so much as meet my hero as stumble upon him by accident - not once, but twice.

The first time was far too many years ago to quote accurately. My Granny Munro had taken me to Edinburgh for a few days; a treat to celebrate moving on from primary to secondary school. I believed I was going there to help her, reading the numbers on approaching buses, hailing cabs, deciphering street maps, that sort of thing. In reality, of course, she was looking after me; taking me to interesting places and buying non-stop treats. The things we realise after folk have gone!

One of the excursions she arranged was a guided tour of Edinburgh Castle. The youngest of the group by a good sixty years, I trudged up the cobbled hill towards the castle, trying to pay attention to what the kilted guide was saying, hoping we’d get back to the shops before long. But then a couple of louts joined us, smirking, at the back.

Nervous of ‘bad boys’, I kept my head down.

            “Excuse me,” the guide called out to them, after a few minutes. “This is a private tour. Do you mind leaving us alone?”

            So the two louts shuffled good-humouredly off down the hill. I risked a glance over my shoulder. Tchuh. One of them hadn’t even bothered to get dressed - he was in his pyjamas!

            Hang on.

            He was in his pyjamas…

            He was Johnny Fingers from the Boomtown Rats.

            The other lout was Bob Geldof.

Heroes? I’m telling you, it was all I could do not to point and shout “Bob! Bob! There’s Someone Lookin’ At Ya!” which was one of their singles and would have guaranteed instant stalker status - quite an appealing thought for a twelve-year-old.

            Beside myself with excitement, I dashed over to Granny and brought her up to speed.

            “Then what are we waiting for?” was probably more or less what she said, and together we gave chase, back down the cobbled hill, eventually collaring them for a photo near the car park at the bottom.

            Bob couldn’t have been more charming. Obligingly, he stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders, and smiled into Granny’s camera. I could feel his breath on the top of my head.

The photo is a hoot; I still have it in a scrapbook. He’s wearing a leather jacket, red drainpipe trousers, green suede shoes and a soft, sexy smile. I’m wearing a blue ski anorak with a collar wide enough to land helicopters on, a checked lumberjack shirt, flares, Jesus sandals with grey tights underneath, and a miniature Coca-Cola can necklace which I’d just bought and which broke the same day. My puffy wee face is an ominous reminder never, ever to give up the jogging.

            Anyhow, I bumped into him a second time, just last year, in a DVD rental shop on London’s King’s Road. He was Sir Bob by then. It took a few moments before I realised that the craggy, greying man in the shabby long tweed coat browsing the DVD rack beside me was HIM.

            What had we both done in the intervening years? Well, I’d lost some of the puffy face. He’d fed Africa. Hmmm. I chose my hero well.

            Sir Bob seemed in no hurry to pick a DVD. Meanwhile I went through agonies wondering whether to say something.

            How about the cheesy-but-honest: “I love you very, very much and think you are a wonderful human being,” or, bolder and scarier: “Sir Bob! Edinburgh Castle! You and me! Remember - Granny took our picture?”

            He must have been aware that the strange woman to his right had kind of frozen, holding ‘How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days’ in one hand and ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ in the other. Just…staring.

            Cowardice, plus a desire not to come across as a mad bat, won out. I left the poor bloke alone, and he left the shop, unmolested.

            Both encounters made my day. I’ll never forget them. Nothing much happened, but, well, y’know. That’s the thing about meeting heroes.

            So let’s hear it for heroes! And Grannies, come to think of it. They are so often one and the same.

We are lazy about organising holidays. Life is so nice at home, for a start. The garden starts to come into its own around now, the weather’s kind and the children are being helpful - partly because they are wonderful but mostly because they have made that link between good behaviour and holiday treats.

            So, where to go? What to do? There are a few destinations on our wish-list which coincide, but mostly our discussions about where to grace with our presence for two weeks end up in sullen stalemate. We usually holiday in the UK and very nice it is too, but that doesn’t stop the annual tizzy about whether to go abroad or not.

            Me? Iceland or New York, thanks. The children? Egypt, to see the Pyramids. Or back to Menorca. My husband? Something hearty involving Pyrenees and bikes. There is so little common ground that we are always destined to be going down the compromise route that doesn’t suit any one of us 100%, but we never admit that until woefully late in the game.

            So off I hop onto the internet, and begin the first of a long series of doomed evenings trying to out-smart the holiday industry. I shudder to think how many times I have been round the world, online. Continued