I’m revisiting this review in time for Bristol Book Club’s Meetup next week. Over two years ago 49p in one of those discount bookshops outside Bideford got me a copy of Mary Shelley’s classic and, to some folk, the first science fiction novel. I could have bought David Copperfield for the same price but felt that Frankenstein would be less challenging for a post-holiday read.

How wrong can you be? I can cope with the wordiness and convoluted sentences of that era, so I didn’t struggle at first. But Victor Frankenstein, he goes on and on about how miserable he is and what tedious company he must be for his friends and family; and when he’s done going on about it, he goes on some more. Well, yeah, you’re tedious to the reader too, buddy. Just get over yourself.

Pages and pages of it. One long, persistent complaint. Don’t we all know people like that? And don’t we all wish we could make our excuses and leave at the earliest opportunity? “Me, me, me, me, me.” They dominate the conversation; they dominate your life. Jesus, I don’t want to read about it as well.

And then that gives them another complaint: “you don’t care about me.” Oh, my God. The fact is: they’re gonna complain about something.

I dropped the book at the point where Frankenstein was about to create Mrs Monster. I was sure that’d turn out badly too.

A propos of nothing, absolutely nobody has ever asked me, “How do you decide what to do next?” So here’s my unawaited answer.

I make a list of my tasks. Nothing new there but they are in no particular order. Then I take the top two and ask, “Which is more important?” If it’s the first, I do it, not necessarily to completion, just long enough (some of my tasks will take years). Then I take number two and three and ask the same question. And so on.

Any time the latter of the pair is more important, I swap the two and move on to the next pair. It works like a squash ladder.

Because I have too many tasks, I stop doing them somewhere down the list and just swap the remaining tasks as necessary, which in time should bubble up to become doable. Then I return to the top.

It’s simple and, unlike most systems, not an entire task in itself. It has little overhead and is also kinda fun. That’s why I am where I am today. Er… not really anywhere at all.

Is that all there is? We’ve all asked that question. Who am I? What’s my role?

What do you contribute to life? Maybe your unique human ability to observe and appreciate the beauty of our planet, to nurture it, to be the guardian.

These words… they sound so cheesy. They can’t express possibility: English, the language of conquest and conflict, is not mature enough to communicate the spiritual, the ineffable. This feeling may predate our verbal stage; it may never have been but is yet to come. In any case the divine is available and increasingly necessary: our very planet is endangered – animals, plants and ecosystems.

But they are the key to unlock our higher selves. The natural world with all its manifestations is accessible to all of us.

A planet where all organisms, and even the rocks, air and seas, fulfil their roles, designed over millions of years; where we fulfil a new role of appreciating and guarding the Earth. It’s the only home for us and our fellow creatures, certainly until the day it becomes our platform for the stars.

This blog speaks for our home, which needs all the help it can get (follow the worldometers logo to see why). It speaks particularly for birds, as my personal favourites and top-notch indicators of environmental health. If they’re doing badly, the planet is doing badly.

And they are doing very badly.

Let’s get them back on track, for a start.

The most important thing about me is what I can do for Planet Earth. It needs all the help it can get. So whatever effort I make and whatever money I earn goes straight back to the World. The most valuable bits of which, on a personal level and as indicators of environmental health, are birds.

If they’re doing badly, the planet is doing badly.

And they are doing badly.

They’re my hobby too so I try to find birds and keep all sorts of birding lists with the excuse that it’s citizen science but it may be no more than my inner trainspotter. At the very least it keeps track of all the sites I’ve visited around the world.

Writing a novel is also a major fulfilment for me and hopefully more than a little entertaining (and informative?) for any reader. So much so that I’m also half-way through two other stories: one is science fiction, the other semi-autobiographical. I also have a travel book about my birding adventures through Australasia.

I’m blessed to have the freedom to live this way although I do see it as a consequence of taking on 100% responsibility for my life – the other side of the coin, as it were. I have Landmark Education and an ongoing process of maintaining integrity (always a challenge!) to thank for that.

It was a coin toss, effectively. I chose just as randomly, as throughout the tour – some good ones, some bad ones, some very bad ones. My days of building spreadsheets with weighted pros and cons had disappeared in 2001 with the advent of the Landmark Forum into my life. The power of choosing without reason, of being unreasonable, was then mine.

Pemberton it was. The Important Bird Area of Sandy Island and its fairy terns would have to await my next visit, not that I knew it existed back in 2008. Instead my Lonely Planet recommended the Gloucester Motel, which promised a lively restaurant. Ahem! It was good but it wasn’t lively, in keeping with the rest of town. In fact I managed to walk right across to the other side of Pemberton without registering a centre to it at all.

This put me by the sawmill and the Club, although Club of what I couldn’t tell. A cricket pitch did adjoin it but no matter: it welcomed non-members and served booze. It could have been a rifle-hunting club for all I cared. I just had to sign in.

And have a beer. Just the one. It was depressing. A great cavernous space, with enough people in it but nowhere near enough to create an atmosphere. Vibes of desperation snaked through the vacuum, like tendrils of smoke. My imagination, I daresay, but I don’t often stop the evening at a single pint once I’ve started.

So I was bright-eyed enough to pick up black-faced cuckoo-shrike and then my 887th lifer before breakfast the next morning. My room’s large sliding windows gave on to an extensive karri-bordered lawn. That helped too. And the lifer was?

Splendid fairy-wren, finally. And don’t Australian birds have such splendid names? Superb this, noisy that, laughing, whistling, elegant, regent. Someone had fun with that lot. But the next eighty miles to Augusta and Cape Leeuwin couldn’t even muster a common whatever until a couple of grey butcherbirds on the road to the lighthouse. ⇐ ⇒

This blog has already hinted at how birding could have meaning. It has also drawn the analogy that monitoring birds is no more than a pilot does by keeping his eye on the altimeter. In terms that are more familiar few of us drive a car without a working fuel gauge, which tells us how many resources remain before we grind to a halt.

So, why worry about resources in the natural world? Won’t science come to our rescue? That’s like not worrying about a bank balance and expecting the bailout of an overdraft, loan or credit card. In nature’s case a loan from future generations as has been pointed out in the parallel with Bernie Madoff. Despite science’s great advances, at the bottom line nature still feeds, clothes and shelters us. 100%.

OK, so you buy all this. But it’s hopeless. What difference will one more person’s environmental consciousness make? Against the billions who don’t give a shit?

One could have asked the same about great human achievements of the past. Democracy. Anti-slavery. The Renaissance. All started by a thought in someone’s head but all reaching a critical mass when that one person tipped the balance. It’s like nuclear power: it don’t work for a while, then – boom! A result. In fact, that’s how our sun got going.

Maybe nuclear power as metaphor for the environmental movement is a little counter-intuitive. In which case get this for what I think is a more potent analogy. Cancer. I know, I know. Just stay with me on this one. Cancer begins with one cell. Just that cell out of countless billions makes all the difference. A virus works the same way.

Like I said: counter-intuitive. But could you be the viral cell that cures us of our ills?

Actually I was having a good time in Western Australia. Travel is just as much about experiencing differences but, being human, we present them as: our way, right; their way, wrong. The whingeing (apart from the one about noisy bastards) should all go down with a pinch of salt. Or sugar. There is an enjoyment to be had from self-righteousness.

Sure, when travelling, bad stuff does happen, exacerbated by the absence of familiar support systems. As I type this, the skies have been clear of contrails for days thanks to an Icelandic volcano shutting down most North European flights. That’s bad. But consider the alternative.

We could all stay at home. Instead of soaking up the Albany sun, I could have been shivering through a British winter. Another year could have passed devoid of fulfilling my childhood fascination with Australia. I wouldn’t have been seeing parrots and honeyeaters and woodswallows and kangaroos and eucalypt forests and mountains and…

That list is far longer than any number of complaints I could register. So, remember that, dear reader, the next time I have a wee moan. Anywhere. Even back home. ⇐ ⇒

A story whose meaning keeps coming back to me. My prize cow was a career in computer programming, which I killed in 2002. I’ve been working its old patch of dirt any number of ways since without making a bean but without the old depression and downright urge to kill myself. So, that’s a blessing.

The biggest game on the planet gets another airing in the New York Times. Poker legend, Amarillo Slim, once said, “If there’s anything worth arguing about, I’ll either bet on it or shut up.” We’re certainly arguing about environmental degradation. Perhaps the do-nothing brigade could accept that they’ve already gambled with their children’s lives and leave the conversation to those deciding how best to bet with today’s money.

Who knows, maybe the environmental expenditure will kickstart us out of recession as per the Green New Deal?