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

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