Happy Canada Day. Nothing makes your heart swell up with that patriotic pride like…a fuzzy snuggling cuddly pile of Canada goslings!

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE

They’re going to snuggle up under their mama’s (I can’t tell the difference, it could be their papa’s) wing.

WHOA HEY WAIT NOT ALL OF YOU

You’re really too big for this, you know.

…and resignation.

I love how that last gosling can’t even fit, so it just snuggles up and buries its FACE in its parent’s feathers.

Via Ben:

I can’t believe I only got 66% on Dorky/Nerd/Awkward, considering that I said I would choose the Internet over sex.

Sketched this at dusk in the pasture at Mudchute Farm, straddling a row of tires. Four or five white-and-brown cows graze slowly across the field, snuffling wetly and chomping and shitting, big placid lawnmowers. It’s clouded over, although out where the O2 and Canary Wharf towers loom the sky’s still peach with sunset.

A trio of kids trip through the field on their way home. Curious and frank, they come up to me and look over my shoulder.

“That’s good. How long did it take you to draw it?”
“How old are you?”
“Are you from America?”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Do you smoke?”
“Are you a virgin?”
“Did you go to art school?”
“What’s your name?”

They giggle a lot, harass the cows (who merely walk somewhere else and continue grazing), and traipse off again. Presently I finish up and head back home too. It’s not dark yet, but the sky looks like rain. There are a zillion different kinds of birdsong in the woods and I think about how if I wanted to I could learn which birds they all belong to.

My tentative plan to visit Israel has been scrapped since Avi mentioned here that

Americans, Canadians, and Brits are sometimes taken aback by the lack of availability of comic books when abroad. Israel , as an example, contains only a handful of comic shops.

Sorry, kiddos…

Of all the cootlings on the pond at Regent’s Park, only one family’s is still a baby; the rest are downy grey-and-white juveniles like the one in the photo.

The oldest brood of red-crested pochard ducklings still have their fluff, but are almost as big as their parents.

The mallards’ ducklings have hatched! They’re just tiny zoomy bits of brown and canary-yellow fluff.

The greylag goslings must have been born some time ago, but are only being brought out onto the water now. Either that, or they’re just really big. They seem to be more of a lemon-yellow.

Of all the coot families there is one that is my particular favourite. Unusually, they have four cootlings — the other families on the pond only have one or two each. (Cursory interwebs research reveals that coots resort to splitting up feeding duties, picking favourites, and often outright infanticide to control brood numbers, especially when food’s scarce. I’ve noticed a couple of cootlings from various families vanish mysteriously between one lunchtime and the next.) Anyway, I usually sit opposite their nest and throw them bread from my sandwich. I have no idea how smart they are or how good their eyesight is, but it seems like they recognise or at least expect me — the parents now run boldly up to the bench and don’t flee when I chase away the geese who are always milling around. The coots will even take the bread right out of my hand.

Anyway, I saw a new feat of coot bravery this time: the parents actually biting Canadian and greylag geese to drive them away from the nest. A goose is two to three times as big as a coot (not counting the wingspan!) and, while birds of roughly the same size fight each other all the time over territory and food (coots have a special chest-bumping wing-puffing intense-diplomatic-talk ritual among each other), smaller birds virtually always defer to the larger. So this was a rare sight!

Yeah. It’s kind of like Meerkat Manor, but less anthropomorphic.

(You can see the rest of my Regent’s Park bird pictures on Flickr.)

Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.

James Nicoll

When I wake up it’s not quite raining. Misting.

My attempt to take a shower earlier so I don’t cut into one roommate’s shower time fails spectacularly when I cut into another roommate’s shower time. I meekly take the scolding and scurry back into my room.

At work, H. and J., who sit next to each other, whisper. I hate that; people did that a lot at my last workplace too. I get paranoid and imagine they’re whispering about how I’m going to be sacked, or about my outfit, or whatever. I know perfectly well they’re probably not talking about me at all, but it still makes me nervous. I vow to become a freelancer as soon as possible so I don’t have to work in an office.

It’s still rainy, so instead of feeding the ducks at lunch I sit in a sandwich shop and work on a comic.

L., girl-I-briefly-dated-before- she-decided-it-wasn’t-a-good-time-for -a-relationship-so-now-we’re-just-friends -even-though-I-still-kind-of-like- her-but-it’s-cool, texts me. We head out into Marylebone in the pouring rain and find a quiet corner in a pub to catch up. She’s anxious about a friend, and moving to a new city in the fall. I’m looking for a new place to live, having failed to fit in with my roommates during our initial trial period. (Their idea of fun: playing fratboy-style drinking games while blasting Britney Spears. My idea of fun: game night with the girls.) I can’t relax at work, I can’t relax at home, it’s just so pleasant to sit and eat chips and joke around with someone who gets me.

L. is signing as she talks in a cued-speech language, possibly Makaton. “…That one time I was in Liverpool — the sign for ‘Liverpool’ is the same as the sign for ‘lesbian’, did you know? I can’t think of a situation where they would be interchangeable…”

We ponder. “The Beatles were ‘from Liverpool’, if you know what I mean,” I suggest. L. laughs and pulls a face. “If you keep doing that it’ll stay that way,” I tease.

“It’s my beard-growing face,” L. says, and demonstrates. “All men make this face when they’re really trying to grow their beard out.”

“Really?”

“Really…”

She runs off to the toilets. I fiddle with my mobile. Two men, construction workers, a younger one and an older one, sit down at the next table over. They say hi, as you do with cute girls sitting alone in pubs, and we make small talk. I am struck by an idea. “Hey,” I say, “what face would you make, if you were concentrating on growing a beard?” They don’t get it. L. comes back just then, and tries to explain it, but gives up.

“So what are you two doing here?” the younger one asks.

“We’re visiting,” I say, “from Liverpool…” and L. cracks up and then gets the giggles and we laugh like crazy people for five minutes straight. The construction workers are bemused, down their pints, and head off.

Back home I lock myself in my room, not even going down for dinner. I curl up with my laptop to finally finish Peter Watts’s Blindsight, and over the next several hours it slowly quietly blows my fucking mind.

I fold up the laptop and put it away and lie in the dark, luminous with the sheer ecstasy of engaging with ideas halfway out of my ken, and coming out of the absorbed rapture I get into when I’m stuck in a book. I cry a little. I am frustrated with the confines of mental illness and general social ineptitude and my uninspiring job and the dreary dreary perpetual state of Not Fitting In. I don’t fit in. Furiously, irrationally, I think: I am brilliant. I should be more than this.

Time to quit faffing around and start making comics.

Love you, Ben.