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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith,

literature for The Spectator and my guest this week is the painter and poet Frieda Hughes,

whose new book is George, a magpie memoir.

Frieda, welcome.

This memoir describes a period of your life in which you adopted a magpie, we'll talk about.

But it's sort of 12 or 13 years ago, I think, isn't it?

More than that even.

What is it that's caused you to focus on this and write about this now?

Well, Sam, okay, this is my confession. I didn't focus on it and write about it now. I wrote about it back then, and then I wrote about it again and again and again. It started as a diary.

I adopted this tiny scrap that I almost bisected in the garden with a shovel and then it screeched.

It had a zest for life and a determination to live even from that first second.

Anyway, so I bring it in and I realized that a couple of things. One is that I know nothing about birds at this

point. I've rescued animals and birds before, but briefly a couple of days here, a couple of

days there, they either die or they go free. And this time I am stuck with this little feathered

scrap. And this little feathered scrap developed at such a prodigious rate. He feathered up so

quickly. He doubled in size every three days or so it seemed. And in fact, they pretty much do.

He pooed enormous quantities because he ate enormous quantities. I was going to say, it's an

awful lot of shit in this book. A friend of mine said,

don't write about the shit. And I said, well, you've got to. If you've got birds, actually,

animals of any kind, but birds are indiscriminate. They shit anywhere and everywhere at any time.

You can't train them like a dog and just take them out for a quick poop in the garden.

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