I do take different routes to and from the station - this is partly a matter of staying interested in the journey and also the current security advice for the Cotswolds which suggests you should vary your route to work in order to confuse any surveillance that might be on you.... Ooops got caught up in a film there.
Right, back to reality. The thing I have noticed in the last few days is the amount of road-kill on my journey. We all know the rules or roadkill.. You can't pick it up if you have hit it etc. etc. But there's been so much pheasant on the road to the station in the last few days I have felt seriously tempted - I suppose a problem arises when you pick up the animal, throw it into the boot of your car and motor off to the station. There 2 things that will happen (although there is a 3rd option):
1) The bird is still alive and, when it recovers from it's unconscious state, it starts to make short work of the boot of your car. Feathers and blood everywhere. Imagine the scene as you get back to your car in the evening and find it has been demolished by an ill-tempered pheasant that is just getting ready to have a go at you. (Have you seen Alfred Hitchcock's"The Birds"?).
2) The bird has been dead for a bit too long. You come back to your car at the end of one of those confusing autumn days that starts of at a temperature of 3c and ends at 25c. Your car is like an oven thus providing the maggots and larvae present in the body of the bird a delightful and fruitful breeding ground. So you arrive at your car in your perpetually weary state, open the boot, ready to throw in your bag, coat, umbrella or other assorted crap and you are confronted by a wave of decomposition and a very smelly car. There are maggots and flies making their home in the upholstery, the putrid air has started to dissolve the plastic in the car and there is no way you can use it. I am now beginning to understand what happened when we found a burned out car at Kingham station one morning. Simple answer. Roadkill. No sense in keeping the car. Just burn it.
3) Take the roadkill on the train to work with you. They'll love you in 1st class. Imagine the disruption of a live bird flapping it's way through the carriage. No etiquette for that situation is there. Only possible option, take out sawn off 12 bore from laptop bag and start blasting..... (ok,caught up in a film again) So, the moral of this story is: Don't stop for roadkill on the way to the station.
Just to finish this off, I was driving through the delightful village near Kingham this morning - the place where ducks go to meet other ducks honestly, there's millions of them - mainly mallards if you're interested)and I had to do a full on emergency stop as one mother duck decided that the moment had come to lead her babies across the road in a nice orderly line. She didn't even blink as 2 tonnes of barely controlled car screeched towards her with clouds of smoke emitting from the tyres and the driver braced himself for impact.
Anyway, I managed to stop. They were fine, so was I. End of story.
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