Second best give first-class results

When his body let him down, literally, DONALD SKINNER-REID had time to ponder his pairings

- DONALD SKINNER-REID

I DON’T know if you have ever spent three hours lying immobile on your back on the floor of your birdroom, but that was my recent fate following an attack of sciatica. The ambulance crew, with a supply of pain-relieving drugs, helped me back into an upright position. My grandfather always said: “You go at the legs first.”

It was, however, an interesting perspective both physically and philosophically. I couldn’t move and was in a great deal of pain, but the birds, in their training cages, were peering down at me, well used to my presence if not my prone position. As the Belgians and gibosos in my collection need to look down-ish (in the case of the Belgians, albeit not too far) and down (in the case of the gibosos) it perhaps reinforced show-cage training which I was in the middle of at the moment.

It was three hours of enforced “leisure”, interspersed with waves of pain, but my mind was clear enough to think about the birds. I think the process is called dissociation!