Tim Dee

There​ was a primed plastic water pistol, yellow or green, on every table at Derek Walcott’s 84th birthday lunch at the Ladera hotel on the west coast of St Lucia. The Walcott entourage had taken over the restaurant and after we’d dined on saltfish with green bananas, the staff gathered and the guests stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Then came the carving of a...

From the first time I first looked through a pair of binoculars, aged seven, I wanted to be a bird-spotter, even though I’d picked the binoculars up because I was a bird-lover, intrigued by the ways birds’ paths crossed with mine. Nowadays bird-spotters are known as birders while bird-lovers are more commonly called birdwatchers. In terms of etymology and ornithology, there is...