Before I became an old bloke, I once interviewed an old bloke whose mission in life was to grow the biggest pumpkin ever.
He wasn’t pursuing the Nobel Peace Prize or even a cryptocurrency empire.
All he wanted was a giant pumpkin in his backyard.
I also remember a lady with a house full of dolls, another who collected buttons, and a bloke who had a shed full of rare bricks — including the sturdy and particularly beautiful Shepparton Brick.
Nothing wrong with that.
However, there are some pursuits that can turn you a bit bonkers.
Last weekend I went for a walk in the bush with an old friend I hadn’t seen for a few years.
Jen was a mathematician and educational psychologist in her working life, so she had always been a bit cerebral, even eccentric.
Now she was showing signs of a life-altering affliction common to a lot of clever people as they age.
During our walk, she kept pulling out her phone and pointing it at the sky, then jabbing at it and making old person harrumphing sounds.
I realised she had become a twitcher.
Jen could name every bird we came across on our walk, and if she heard a call she could not identify instantly, she used a BirdLife Australia app that has 840 different bird songs recorded and uses AI to recognise unidentified bird sounds, and it costs money.
So it’s for serious bird people.
Lately, I’ve been living in fear of falling into the abyss of twitcherworld.
I already have enough pointless afflictions — I paint dystopian visions of climate-affected landscapes; I’m learning pentatonic guitar scales in five positions; I hunt down rare Beatles vinyls; and I’m filling my laptop with gigabytes of poetry, songs and half-finished novels.
So twitching is something I don’t need right now.
But I’ve already started watching birds, trying to name them and falling over logs trying to snap them on my phone camera.
I wear a grey shirt because camo gear really is a bit prepper-macho for a snowflake like me.
I’m now trying to avoid buying Gortex boots with gaiters and a beige waterproof jacket with an elasticated hood, because I’m not ready to give up my social life entirely just yet.
This week, I caught myself trying to mimic the call of a bird that sounds like a gagged woman screaming in a forest at night.
I was in a small café at the time, and everything went silent, including the coffee machine.
This creeping affliction is being fed by the biennial Australian Bird of the Year poll, currently under way.
I have voted for Australia’s rarest bird, the red goshawk, which once soared across Queensland and northern NSW, but which is now confined to remote regions of the north because of climate change and habitat loss.
From down here, the best I can do is hope my vote helps to shine a light on it by pushing it up somewhere near the top of a digital poll.
Does it really matter if the red goshawk disappears for ever from the tree of life?
Probably not.
Shiny oligarchs and crypto hoarders will still breed and foul the nest.
But for old blokes with grandchildren, the world they bequeath will be a smaller, paler version of the one they once enjoyed.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News
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