He has been rather bad tempered lately - there's a lot of feather pulling and flouncing about going on. He's the same every spring, and we are trying to find him a mate - through internet searches rather than through my sitting hooting in the hedge, at least initially.

I figure that owls, like people, should be expected to have their seasonal moments.

The following day I saw Mr Tired, who also finds this time of the year difficult. Mr Tired tells me that he has been told he is bipolar, and I search in vain for any reference to this in his notes.

He wants a reference to it on a sick note and I demur.

I ask who told him he's bipolar and discover it's a woman on the internet who is suing her GP over not being given a sick note for being bipolar. She says the press say that almost 1 in 3 people are bipolar, and that Doctors (you know, those evil people with the capital 'D') are forever under-diagnosing it, to the suable detriment of the unfortunate sick.

Mr Tired sees being bipolar as something rather fashionably artistic, like being a poet or a fan of Accrington Stanley. He says lots of people are bipolar and don't know it.

How does one tell, then, I ask curiously? Well, he says sometimes they are happy, and sometimes they are sad.

And sometimes, I think, could it be that they are an owl?

How ridiculous. I am falling for the drug-company sponsored version of the world, in which we can all be medicated into something better, even our owls.

I tell Mr Tired that once we called being bipolar manic depression, and you needed to be both manic and have depression to qualify. I cannot believe that a third of all people have manic depression.

I tell him that a caring doctor would not put such a diagnosis on his record willy-nilly, lest he want to become an RAF fighter pilot at a later date, and we agree to ask the mental health team for its view.

Its view, as it turns out, is that he's bipolar. I go home and face my owl with new respect.

A bipolar owl. Not a lot of people have one of those.

• Dr Selby is a GP from Suffolk. Email her at GPcolumnists@haymarket.com