2025

Happy New Year! Thank you all for supporting Six Things in 2024. It’s much appreciated.

This time last year I made a rash promise to bring you weekly posts about birds, a habit I managed to maintain for nearly half the year, until General Stuff and Lack Of Time knocked that plan on the head with a resounding clonk.

I am again starting the year with the best of intentions, so here and now am making the grand declaration that 2025 will be The Year Of 100 Birds. I’ll send you potted biographies of two British birds each week, as well as a little bit of writing about whatever bird-related subject takes my fancy at the time. I’ll send the first of these next Wednesday, 8th January.

I fully intend to record audio versions of these posts. I also intend to hold weekly chats on Sundays for bird fans, where you get to tell me what you’ve seen recently, I tell you what I’ve seen recently, and we generally shoot the breeze and have a pleasant time of it.

So that’s the intention. But you know what they say about intentions.

To recap, this will be the pattern:

– Six Things (Saturdays) – things that have caught my eye, ear, nose, or that unknown sense that makes you turn round and go ‘hello, what was that?’

– Birds (Wednesdays) – celebrating my love of birds and hoping to enthuse people to feel similarly about them.

– Chats (Sundays) – bird-related fun times

You should be subscribed to all of this by default, but you can easily manage which ones you get in your subscription settings.

If you want to get a flavour of what you’re in for, there’s an example of a Six Things post here, and an example of a Birds post here.

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Payments

I’ve gone back and forth and round and round about payments. On the one hand, I like to be rewarded for my work; on the other, I don’t want to exclude anyone. The other hand, on this occasion, has won. So this year, everything on here will be free to everyone. This means that if you’ve already signed up as a paying subscriber in the hope of receiving special, secret content, you’ll be disappointed. I’m sorry – do feel free to storm off in disgust. But if you do start or continue a paying subscription, please know that it’s enormously appreciated and that you will, by doing so, be enabling me to spend more time writing nice things on here and making them as good as I possibly can.

If, after reading this, you still want to sign up as a paying subscriber, it’ll cost you £4 for monthly payments, or £40 for an annual subscription.

And if you’d like to reward me, but don’t want to commit to £4 a month or £40 a year, then you can make a one-off contribution on Ko-fi.

That’s it. Do let me know what you think, and if you have any questions at all I am just a click away. Here’s wishing you the happiest of new years and a prosperous 2025.