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From Kevin Marsh
Much of the week has been taken up in punching holes into cardboard boxes to have somewhere to put all the swans.
It's getting very noisy, dusty and really rather smelly and I hope the RSPB or RSPCA don't drop in on one of their surprise raids because they probably wouldn't much like the way we've got the boxes piled on top of one another in the corner of the kitchen. But needs must.
That aside, the swan thing has been a huge success from the broadcasting point of view... though less of a success from the avian life chance aspect. In the sense that horrid things might well have happened to some of "our" swans.
You'll know the idea by now.
Those chaps in the natural history unit got some boffins to put radio transmission equipment on half a dozen birds - I don't know what it was exactly but I imagine it was the the usual sort of thing that we give reporters on Today: tape recorder, headphones, satellite phone, laptop, expenses forms. And then they let them go out there in Arctic Russia where they hoped, when the autumn came, they'd join the flocks of swans that fly to Britain every winter and send us regular reports along the way. They do this every year, so, apparently, it was a sure thing.
Unfortunately, those chaps in the natural history unit don't have my experience of what happens when you send anyone out of the Today studio with reporting equipment - a reporter, say. Without fail, you never hear from them again. Well, not until you see their expenses or get a threatening letter from a car hire company asking why their three month old Opel Corsa (air conditioning not included) hired from their Cricklewood office was found stripped to the chassis and burnt-out behind a disused massage parlour in Barnsley.
Something similar happened with our swans. Something, in at least one case, a tad more catastrophic than the average Today reporter deployment because it seems one of them might well have been shot by a Finn or a Balt.
But that's not all. True to Today's form in making technology work, at the time of writing it looks like all the equipment might have gone phutt on a couple of them leaving just two active and still in possession of the kit we gave them.
I say active but that, as it happens, is a bit of an overstatement.
The reasons are complex but boil down to the fact that when all this was being planned we were inhabiting a different universe - one in which the seasons behave properly and it would be reasonable to expect that about now the swans would run out of food, shelter, sun tan lotion etc and hoof it back to the UK.
But no. Apparently Andrei and Huc (the remaining duo) are enjoying the Arctic equivalent of an Indian summer right now and quite literally swanning around at the side of some balmy lake without the slightest intention of getting their act together on the making-it-back-here front.
The worst thing of course is that they can't tell us themselves what they're up to (and this was a bit of a howler in the planning stage, if you ask me) because being swans they famously make no noise until the moment they decide to be terminally swan upped. Thinking about it, that also means it was expecting a bit much giving them satellite phones in the first place.
So there they stay. Unfortunately, that isn't true of thousands of other swans and ducks who decided that it WAS getting a bit parky out east and are now taking up residence at the rate of dozens per day on the Today lean-to roof. Hence the business with the boxes.
One by-product of all this was that the Today patio became covered in fresh guano which wasn't in itself a problem since it was already knee deep in leaves fallen from the trees in the Blue Peter garden. What it did mean, though, was that when it rained the whole goo made the path to and from John's compound so slippery that it became a health and safety issue and no-one was able to take any fresh meat out to him until the end of the week. The saintly Ed managed to find a way through before that but it involved walking across the surface of the large pond that goes down one side of the garden so it wasn't really on for anyone else to follow him.
Controversy of the week - how come so many teenagers desport themselves clad only in risibly small strips of cloth while outraging local morals within 20 miles of every club 18-30 resort… and yet flee in horror from nudity in the locker room, shower or swimming pool ?? We never resolved it - though we did get an insight into the mindset of the 1960s public schoolboy who told us that "in his day… wearing swimming trunks was a privilege". That probably took us somewhere we didn't want to go…
Kevin
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