A Con­spir­acy of Feathered Sim­pletons, Part One

Word­count = 96,050

And then, of course, there’s the ques­tion of the evol­u­tion­ary future of pigeons.

A few months ago I repor­ted in these pages that through a series of unfor­tu­nate cir­cum­stances my edit­or­ial con­sult­ant had to be con­fined to the house for reas­ons of pro­phy­lactic hygiene. Con­sequently, he and I have spent the day­light hours of the last eleven weeks like a pair of isol­ated light­house keep­ers, which is to say com­pos­ing sea shanties, threat­en­ing to murder each other and peri­od­ic­ally going mad.

Today, finally, was his day of release. We par­ted com­pany after break­fast, I with a prom­ise to stay in touch, he with a pla­cat­ory wee on the door mat.

In fact, watch­ing him reac­quaint him­self with the non-carpet uni­verse, I was reminded of how edit­or­ial con­sult­ants divide their world into four kinds of thing: things to eat, things to kill, plants, and things with which to per­form acts which the vet had con­fid­ently assured us he could no longer per­form, but which every lonely light­house keeper dreams of, late at night when the fog is thick and the sea­ways clear.

It’s pos­sible to for­get some things very quickly. Spe­cific­ally, it occurred to me as I watched him scarper over the back fence that I had for­got­ten about my consultant’s past habit of turn­ing up to edit­or­ial meet­ings with a pigeon in his mouth.

My first reac­tion in this situ­ation is always reflex­ively to won­der if I should have brought a packet of Tim Tams or something.

Then I tend to get angry. Not with my con­sult­ant, who is after all only fol­low­ing the nat­ural con­sultat­ive urges that served his ancest­ors so well on the savan­nah, where the edit­or­ial con­sult­ant roamed free, sat­ing their hun­ger among the herds of wild, gal­lop­ing desktop publishers.

No, I get angry with the pigeon. My con­sult­ant wears a bell and a num­ber of tinkly metal medal­lions, and is in any event an appalling hunter (upon spot­ting his prey, he tends to slink cun­ningly into plain view, crouch sleekly in an open patch of ground and then spend five minutes excitedly wig­gling his bot­tom and pivot­ing on altern­ate back feet, in an out­stand­ing imper­son­a­tion of Elvis Pres­ley circa 1956. He is, in this respect, the only known mam­mal to per­form a vic­tory dance before actu­ally catch­ing his victim.)

Under what cir­cum­stances, I fume at the pigeon while it stares dumbly at me from the hall­way floor, could this hip-swivelling nit­wit have caught you? I couldn’t have made him more obvi­ous had I fit­ted him with halo­gen head­lights and a siren.

And yet here you are, lolling about on my car­pet with a roughed-up wing, filling me with all the sur­ging guilt with which ten thou­sand years of civil­isa­tion has amply fur­nished my Anglo-Celtic gen­ome. I was just enjoy­ing a pleas­ant cup of tea and a bit of light Bach when in you swan to remind me that the last time any­one in my fam­ily tree had the hunter’s instinct, it was snow­ing in Egypt.

Because now, weak-chinned as I am, I am faced with the Decision.

To be con­tin­ued…