Category: pigeons

It is “No Mow” May.

This is blindingly obvious if you step outside your house and are confronted with what appears to be Epping Forest; no one has mown the communal streets seemingly since the last Ice Age.

I never had “No Mow” Any Time Period growing up in my fourth-floor Balham flat.  Mowing wasn’t easy, four floors up.  We were so far up, off the ground, it was more fly-past then Flymo.

I’m wondering, when they eventually get round to cutting the Serengeti-type grass outside my house, what they’ll find?  Butterflies; bees; beetles?  Most certainly.  However, it has grown so high I wouldn’t be surprised to see hordes of wildebeest; the lost city of Atlantis or The Borrowers living there.

In the ‘60s, I’d wander over Wandsworth Common with my Observer Book of Birds.  During this time, it seemed south-west London only attracted pigeons and sparrows.  I was twenty-eight before I saw my first robin – unless you count Burt Ward.

My father, having been brought up in Marylebone (famed for its birds of paradise), got very bored trying to bird-watch with me, so we used the book as a goalpost. 

From trying to be Peter Scott, I hastily had to become Peter Bonetti.  Equally handy trying to spot cats.  And talking of cats, outside my house, I could have a family of Siberian Tigers living in the undergrowth.  This would explain why Siegfried and Roy have moved in next door.

I’ve developed a fear of birds.

As a child I’d be taken to Trafalgar Square; bought threepennys’ worth of bird seed and put in the middle of Sir Edwin Landseer’s lions to be savaged by more birds than Burt Lancaster.

No fear – just a higher-than-normal dry-cleaning bill.

Years later, I’d cross over roads like the people who’d walked past before the Good Samaritan to avoid any pigeons; such was my avian terror.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s I’d play football on Wandsworth Common and call for a mate en route.  He owned a budgie (he‘d actually owned several, except his myopic dad would invariably tread on them, although he would secretly replace them with ones with totally different colouring).

If my mate wasn’t ready, I’d have to wait and sit in the kitchen, where the family did 99% of their activities – and where the budgie was caged. Because the family’s favourite film was Born Free, the budgie was encouraged to fly around.

Budgies sense pathological fear (and hate).

In my mind’s eye this budgie was as threatening as a pterodactyl and would make a beeline (or budgieline in this case) for me as if I were a giant cuttlefish or had Trill in my hair.

Such is my fear these days that, if I ever visit anyone, I have to ask: “are there any small mirrors with tiny bells in this house?”.   I’ve also stopped watching any TV series involving Adam Faith.