SPECTATOR rather fancies his chances as an amateur wildlife cameraman. A bane of his life in the back garden between October and March used to be the thieving grey squirrel which regularly plundered nuts from vulnerable plastic bird feeders until rodent-resistant wire containers were substituted.

Come high summer and it's the thieving magpie, or is Spectator guilty of an injustice? Maybe it's just a big bird which has every right to visit a fat ball suspended from a tree branch at £1.05 a go but in so doing simply crowds everything else out.

Viewed from Spectator's kitchen window, however, this magpie perched on the branch was a real circus performer. Probably too clumsy and heavy to cling to the ball by its feet, the bird used its beak to haul the thing up by the string to its own level, somehow contriving to hold it in place while it dined voraciously. No wonder fat balls don't last long.

The other day Spectator waited quietly and patiently behind bushes with his camcorder, finally zooming in to capture the encore. The resulting footage may be offered to David Attenborough, Bill Oddie or, going more down market, that programme about the world's funniest animals.

Sweet memories

IT wasn't the dancing, or the singing, the beer or the usual meetings of old friends which most impressed one of the sides gathered at Masham for the recent folk weekend.

It was the sweet shop.

"It's a real, old-fashioned sweet shop and prides itself on selling 'old' sweets," commented one member, but what really got her side going was when she read out "sweet tobacco" from the shop's bill of fare and several of them "yelled in glee", remembering it from their childhood.

Sweet tobacco is strands of coconut covered in sugar and cocoa powder.

Not being required to be sophisticated grown-ups (it was a folk weekend, after all) they indulged themselves in the taste of their memories.

Sweet sounds

WHAT a cracking evening was had at Darlington's Forum music venue on Monday, thanks to the Alf Hind Big Band.

Spectator had never come across this 16-piece ensemble whose renditions of classic melodies penned by the likes of Glen Miller, Cole Porter, Stan Kenton and the like were an absolute delight.

The evening was in aid of a good cause too, the Darlington branch of the Downs Syndrome Educational Trust, for which almost £900 was raised. The band played exquisitely for free