I am a coward. I really do not enjoy horror films. Or even films that aren’t horror films but have possibly slightly frightening moments. Or, worst of all, ‘the psychological thriller’, that leaves one questioning the normality of the terrain of your own mind.  I have, therefore, been traumatised by Black Swan. I did not realise the extremity of my trauma initially, thinking that after a couple of episodes of Friends and some deep breaths my nerves had been soothed, but looking over my notes for this week’s column, I realise the case is much deeper rooted. They read simply: “WHY ARE THERE SO MANY BIRDS?! Is Cambridge turning into heaven or perhaps hell?!”  I am Natalie Portman in Black Swan seeing feathered friends left, right, and centre as an awful projection of my awful psychosis. I am Tippi Hendren in The Birds, watching as a nightmare vision unfolds in my own favoured peaceful town.

I do, thank God, have some justification for this mad scrawling, some grip onto reality: the news is this week of a distinctly avian variety. I am going to try to escape this horrific mindset and look on the bright side, taking as my mentor, Emily Dickinson, who wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.” MUCH nicer.

Cambridge is – as if we didn’t know before – especially heavenly. A report published this week revealed that although numbers of farmland and woodland birds across the country has hit an all time low, “The Cambridgeshire Fens is one of the UK’s top farmland bird hotspots, where some of our fastest declining farmland birds are still hanging on,” according to Nicola Williamson, the RSPB’s fenland farmland bird adviser in Cambridge. “Still hanging on”, that’s a reassuring phrase isn’t it, conjuring images not of Hitchcock’s bird war...bird attack... plague but of plucky robins and resilient sparrows.

This week it is not just the rural Fenlands playing host to birds. Overnight colourful birds appeared, perched among the grey stretches of the Sidgewick, New Museums and Downing site, all reading – excitingly rather than eerily, really not eerily, it isn’t – HAVE YOU SEEN THE BIRDS? with a link to a website, where one found a countdown to midday on Wednesday. It was then revealed that the birds were the mascots of Linkline, a listening support and information service run by anonymous student volunteers (They do not advertise help for those who hallucinate birds on their websites. Sigh.)

Dickinson suggests birds are parading as angels, yet Cambridge seems to be overflowing with angels parading as birds. Www.anonymouspigeon.co.uk shows more anonymous angels flying around Cambridge; students can go on the website, write a message for a particular person, which will then be printed in black ink on card and then delivered by volunteers within 24 hours to the recipient’s pigeon hole. The service will stop on February 15th, after the Valentine’s coos of love birds have been delivered.

Cambridge students were themselves sent out like anonymous pigeons into the world, literally spreading their wings as they took part in RAG Jailbreak, Contestants took roost as far-a-field as Buenos Aires, LA, New York and Casablanca.  Team 97, according to RAG’s map, decided to stay put on Parkers Piece, and really, who can blame them... They were probably worried planes wouldn’t be movin’ too fast, theyd get trapped and missing the arrival on the Cambridge scene of The Artful Dodger, set to play at Churchill Spring Ball on the 11th February. I mean you cant just re-e-wind time.

Birds of a feather flocked together on Thursday night, at a dinner open only to people called Tom, held to raise money for the charity Tommy’s which works with mothers and babies who experience difficulties during pregnancy and childbirth. I’m sure the TOPcats, got up to much TOMfoolery, and filled their TOMmys with TOMato soup followed by Tom Yum Kung.... Kill me now, what TOMmyrot.

Finally, on a stretch of the A14 near Cambridge was closed, after a lorry caught fire and shed, flying across the road and surrounding fields, decking bushes and trees like snow or confetti its load of.... millions and millions of ... white bird feathers.