This week a leaflet from the council was pushed through my door, so I suppose everybody got one.
And quite honestly it has thrown me. And so a week of research began. Do I follow the advice written upon it or continue to do that which I have been doing all my life?
Let me explain. On a newly painted bookcase in my new house, so far from being renovated, are my most treasured books and other bits and bats.
Amidst the chaos of refurbishment, they are one of the few symbols of what it will become once it is completed.
Full of treasure from the past, they make me smile when the rest of my life is still in boxes or strewn about everywhere. Yet that little bookshelf is perfect.
Everything in its place because everything reminds me of a place and time. It's an eclectic mix.
Dad's arm pips from his days as a policeman, Kathy's book about Richard.
The press pass from the trial of the Yorkshire Ripper to remind me where it all began. And so much more. I don't do minimalism. I embrace my memories by having them on display as well as in my head.
But this week I picked up a little book placed deliberately on the top shelf. It is battered and worn and has I haven't picked up in years apart from placing it in pride of place on my newly painted bookshelf.
It has long since lost its jacket and the once strong caramel has faded to a murky beige. But it will also be out in display. It will always be beautiful. Inside the name P.Ackroyd is written in my mum's beautiful handwriting. It is the Observer book of Birds.
Today I picked it up again. And it's all because of that darned leaflet. In the days when bacon wasn't pre packed, when it wasn't pumped full of water that turned the frying pan cloudy we went to the butchers.
Rind on or off Mrs Ackroyd he would say. Her answer was the same. Leave it on please I like to give it to the birds. And together we would cut off the thick fatty rind and take it to the ancient bird table in her garden.
She would hand me a bag of peanuts and a darning needle and I would go to the cupboard under the stairs and thread a string to hang from there too.
Never too low and only in winter when the birds had stripped what was left of the Autumn berries and the ground was too frozen for them to collect the worms.
I can't say Mum was an animal person. She didn't like cats, I think it was almost a phobia and we never had a dog. But birds. She loved them.
They were reflected in the ornaments on her mantelpiece and the pictures on her walls. And she knew them all. Thanks in part to that little book.
On our usual Sunday runs out Dad would be busy taking photographs while Mum got out the binoculars to see what she could spy in the sky. For someone who kept her feet very firmly on the ground, to see a flight of swallows or a murmuration of starlings, a host of sparrows lifted her soul.
And yes she made sure I learned all the correct collective terms so I know finches gather in charms, sparrows become a host and crows became a murder. (She didn't care much for crows.) But in the glove compartment would be that little book of birds and together we would identify what we were seeing.
All through her life when I was a youngster and later when Dad had passed away that little book was never far from her during winter.
Long before they told us it was a thing she bemoaned the fact that fewer and fewer sparrows were visiting.
And also watched from the kitchen window of her suburban semi as they came to feed, running outside and chasing away the squirrels who came to steal the food that was meant for them.
Years later someone stole that little bird feeder that had been her mum's too leaving her with only the flat stone base. I was both furious and saddened but I knew what to buy her for Christmas that year another sturdy bird feeder not as beautiful but just as efficient.
And so every winter they came. The finches and the blue tits pecking away at her string of peanuts and her bacon rind. The first thing she did when I opened her kitchen door was tell me who had visited that day.
And if she could identify the rarer species that visited from that little book too. But the joy of seeing the first robin, her all time favourite, never diminished. And I swear there wasn't a year went by when they didn't make an appearance both in her garden and among the hundred christmas cards she sent to all her friends and family.
Only this week I got a leaflet. DO NOT FEED THE BIRDS it screamed. Instead of a picture of a bird there was instead a picture of a rat. It had the impact it was designed to do.
Made me question all I had planned to do in my own little garden. Look I know rats are a problem in both urban and rural areas. They always have been since the days of the Pied Piper. But are we really to stop feeding the birds, especially as winter beckons? And so my research began.
It is certainly true that throwing out stale bread for the birds, another thing my mum always did, attracts vermin. So do I stop? According to the leaflet I should.
Ok then, actually bread isn't the healthiest option for birds any way according to my research. But is my newly erected bird table to remain empty? The suggestion is it discourages birds from foraging. They become less reliant on nature and lose the ability to fend for themselves? And I care about birds.
So much so that I followed the suggestion when I moved into my little house and wanted to tackle the overgrown garden at the back and waited until I was absolutely certain there were no nesting birds.
I can't tell you how many times I scrambled through the undergrowth trying to check if they were there before we finally trimmed, not cut down entirely the little hedge at the back adjoining the fields. And yes it is still there waiting and hoping that it provides a safe harbour in spring for those it was designed for originally.
I will never have a concrete garden filled entirely with pots. Because my mum always planted for the birds shrubs that became laden with berries in winter and shelter from the rain throughout the year.
Holly and pyracantha, rowan and roses that turned their blooms into hips and jaws come autumn. She always used to say we were in for a hard winter when they were stripped bare particularly early each year.
And so what to do now? There is a suggestion that some limited feeding might be good for the bird population. But until I complete my research my bird table will remain empty. Anyway all the rain has meant there is now abundance of juicy worms emerging from the dry cracked ground giving me time to decide much much later.
Because the problem is I am as conditioned as much as I ever could be by childhood and habit to ever consider if I am part of the problem of nature. I couldn't give a damn about the rats. I have had years of experience at stables and with feed bins to know the little blighters get everywhere and I can honestly say I have never seen one in my garden or my mum's. At the stables yes, surrounding rubbish bins in town, absolutely.
Feed the birds? Until I work it out I will hold back. Mum would have the answer, a child of the countryside who lived most of her life in a town. And I couldn't care a tuppence about demanding I should stop on a leaflet from a council.
But it has made me think. In the meantime at least it has made me also take down from my bookcase a little book well thumbed, and greatly treasured by a lady who wrote her name in the front cover and my life for almost sixty years.