It is “No Mow” May.

This is blindingly obvious if you step outside your house and are confronted with what appears to be Epping Forest; no one has mown the communal streets seemingly since the last Ice Age.

I never had “No Mow” Any Time Period growing up in my fourth-floor Balham flat.  Mowing wasn’t easy, four floors up.  We were so far up, off the ground, it was more fly-past then Flymo.

I’m wondering, when they eventually get round to cutting the Serengeti-type grass outside my house, what they’ll find?  Butterflies; bees; beetles?  Most certainly.  However, it has grown so high I wouldn’t be surprised to see hordes of wildebeest; the lost city of Atlantis or The Borrowers living there.

In the ‘60s, I’d wander over Wandsworth Common with my Observer Book of Birds.  During this time, it seemed south-west London only attracted pigeons and sparrows.  I was twenty-eight before I saw my first robin – unless you count Burt Ward.

My father, having been brought up in Marylebone (famed for its birds of paradise), got very bored trying to bird-watch with me, so we used the book as a goalpost. 

From trying to be Peter Scott, I hastily had to become Peter Bonetti.  Equally handy trying to spot cats.  And talking of cats, outside my house, I could have a family of Siberian Tigers living in the undergrowth.  This would explain why Siegfried and Roy have moved in next door.