Avian invasion

It's the harsh 'Sqruawck!' that often alerts you to their presence. Then there is the flash of fluorescent green in the sky. If they're perched in a tree, you may even get a glimpse of red beak.

As a resident of Richmond, I'm terribly proud of our parakeet population. A chance sighting during the day feels like a cheery greeting from the gods, a bright hint of good fortune and conviviality.

Now, Paradise Road, the 'extremely small' publisher behind writer Peter Watts's estimable investigation of Battersea Power Station, Up In Smoke, has produced The Parakeeting of London, by 'gonzo ornithologists' Nick Hunt and Tim Mitchell. A delightful trawl through the history and mythology of our cocksure neighbours, it's interspersed with many wonderful interviews with random passersby, whose views frequently stray into chance musings on immigration and belonging.

It's a terrific read and you can order a copy from Paradise Road, or ask your local bookshop to get it in.

Not so slight return

Gangway are back, back, back! The Danish pop group, who split up in 1998, release a fantastic new album, Whatever It Is, on 5 April. Fêted with multiple awards in their home country, their biggest moment in the UK probably came with dissolute single My Girl and Me (1986).

Gangway's first album The Twist, with its echoes of The Smiths, came out back in 1984; Whatever It Is feels appropriately like the follow-up to the band's final, seventh, That's Life (1996). In the spirit of experimentation on that album, Whatever It Is is completely contemporary - as if That's Life had been moved forward in time.

The songwriting is as lovely as ever, as evidenced on first single Colourful Combinations, augmented by some fascinating sounds: there's a great mix from track Whatever… to the penultimate Exit, with its sample reference to where they left off 23 years ago - a hiatus worthy of filmmakers Whit Stillman, Terrence Malick or Roy Andersson. Second single Don't Want to Go Home, reworked from songwriter Henrik Balling's The Quiet Boy side project, sits particularly well here (I love, again, the odd noise at the end).

The band intend to back up this tremendous achievement with a series of live dates throughout the year. You can find links to the album and more on the band's Facebook page.

New from the BFI

Some exciting news: I've contributed a piece about Georges Simenon to the booklet accompanying a new, dual format edition of 1967 film Stranger in the House. This adaptation of the Belgian author's novel Les inconnus dans la maison (1940) by director Pierre Rouve stars James Mason alongside Geraldine Chaplin and Bobby Darin. It's been released as part of the BFI's Flipside strand - you can read more about it and order a copy here. As the image on the booklet cover declares: 'A great Simenon becomes a great film.'