I am very aware that I have led a charmed and privileged life. I’ve had all the good fortune that life could throw at one — apart from money, of course, I’ve never had any of that — but everything else has slotted happily into place.

Here’s an example. In the early ’70s I was sharing a cottage in Lindfield, Sussex with my old mate Evan Seys and commuting to St James’s Place in London every day. I was woken early one morning by a banging and scratching at my window. Drawing the curtain, I was confronted by a huge bird standing on the windowsill and pecking at the panes. It was like a giant blue magpie with a fancy great tail. Evan came into my room. “What the hell is that?” There was no camera available so I attempted to draw it.

There was no internet in those days, so I couldn’t search and identify it. I had the standard Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, by Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort and P. A. D. Hollom, but of course it wasn’t in the book. It couldn’t have been a European bird; it must have escaped from an aviary.

I took my drawing into work and Eric Major, our PR manager, was in the next office having a meeting with two men. There were photographs of birds all over the desk. I walked in, showed them my crude drawing and asked “Do you know what this is?”

Mountfort and Hollom, two-thirds of the authors of the Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, scratched their heads and agreed it was an Occipital Blue Pie, a bird of the magpie family from the Himalayas. It was unlikely to have flown to Haywards Heath from Kathmandu; it was clearly an escapee from an ornamental aviary.

At The Crocodile at Daneshill that evening Evan asked if I’d found out anything about the bird. “It’s an Occipital Blue Pie,” I answered. “Guy Mountfort and Philip Hollom confirmed it.” “Fine,” said Evan.

Neither of us were remotely surprised that two of Britain’s leading ornithologists had just happened to be in the next office to mine that morning.

So we had another pint.

Life’s been like that.

And now the Liszt Collection has uploaded an engraving of the Occipital Blue Pie to fotoLibra, and here it is, with fotoLibra watermark. Quite a thing to find on your windowsill at the crack of dawn. That’s what has inspired this little reminiscence.

Occipital Blue Pie, © The Liszt Collection / fotoLibra

Dubai has just announced the launch of ‘Dubai Font’, developed by Microsoft. The font was designed with both Latin and Arabic scripts and is available to Office 365 users.

“It is the first font to be developed by a city and to carry its name,” claimed council secretary general Abdulla al-Shaiban, which is true if the most important part of the sentence is the ‘and’.

Well, this new font is featureless, like a desert. So I suppose it’s apt.

I was interviewed on Radio Wales yesterday about it. I said it was vanilla, unnoticeable. Which in a text face is a desirable characteristic.

But designed by Microsoft? If I wanted a font designed, I’d go to a font designer, not a software company. If you wanted a racing car designed, would you go to Ferrari, or Facebook?

And a first? Hardly. Loads of cities have typographical identities, but not all of them have authorities who can impose their demands. All corporations have graphic identities, some more forceful than others.

If you’re going to associate a font with a city, you might at least give it some character. Look at London — as soon as you see that font with little diamonds instead of dots on the top on the ‘i’s, it says London. That’s because London Transport commissioned Johnston’s Railway Type a hundred years ago, and that went on to inspire Gill Sans, one of the greatest C20 fonts and one which was created in Wales at Capel-y-Ffin.

Spot the difference. When Microsoft created Windows they wanted to use Helvetica but they didn’t like the thought of paying royalties. Like taxes, royalties are what they receive, not what they pay out. So they went to Monotype and commissioned something that would look as much like Helvetica as possible without infringing its copyright. They called it Arial.

DAR BELARJ

Earlier this year Dar Belarj in Marrakesh was showing examples of type families to represent the Latin, Arabic and Tifinagh alphabets. They are uniformly frightful, though crafted with the best intentions. The Latin alphabet and the Arabic alphabet are so alien to each other that any attempt to make them familial is worthy but hopeless. Arabic reads right to left for a start.

No one is going to use these fonts seriously unless they are compelled to. In Dubai Crown Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed al-Maktoum has urged all government institutions to adopt the font in official correspondence.

How strong is ‘urged’?