Avian Scroungers

I was reading the Bible * last night.... Well, actually, no, I was watching a DVD of The Life of Brian, but it’s pretty much the same thing. It got to the part where Christ, err, Brian says “look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap” (Matt 7, 26) and someone in the crowd says He is accusing the birds of being scroungers. It reminded me of an experience I and Ruth had in Helsinki. We had been down to the market on the quayside at lunchtime and had bought some cherries, alleged to be Finnish. Ruth was a bit sceptical of this (what a Doubting Thomasine!) and thought they might be Turkish. They were jolly tasty, as it happens, but that isn’t part of the story. (Does anyone remember Alistair Cooke’s weekly “Letter from America”, broadcast on Radio 4? It was a 15 minute programme and usually he started it with a long digression which only in the last 5 minutes turned out to be apposite to a topic of current news interest. I often tried to see in this digression how soon I could recognise what the topic was going to be. I was seldom right, and my best attempt was only seven minutes in.) So the evening of our cherry purchase, having precautionarily washed the fruits and put them outside to dry, pending consumption as dessert, Ruth and I were seated in our luxurious motorhome quaffing some of the stash of wine we had bought in Estonia to sustain us through the vastnesses of Scandinavia and Finland where alcohol duties are ruinously high when we became aware that the environs of our LMH (luxurious motorhome, keep up!) were the site of excited and one might almost say multitudinous – not something I say that often - bird activity. This raised first our interest, secondly our anger and thirdly our voices as we realised that the perishing seagulls were tucking into our luscious cherries, purchased at Finnish prices. They ate half of them, too. Yes, Extra No.138 in The Life of Brian was right. The birds of the air are scroungers. Seagulls, anyway.


1 Footnote Bloody Hell! I knew that we were carrying too much stuff in the van! Ruth has just told me that apart from the Bhagavad Gita we have not just one, but two copies of the Bible with us! No wonder we are burning so much diesel!