Pigeon Rescue. Chapter 3.

Can you imagine how exciting it is to be actually living a Blockbuster trilogy? This one is titled, “To Pauline’s and Back”, by-line, “Sad and Sadder.” My life that is, the pigeons fine. Earlier today I took it out of the shed and released it, ie chucked it down the garden. It flew! But only just managed the end wall. From yesterday’s experience if I approached it, it would hop over into the opposite gardens undergrowth. You see yesterday it was in next doors garden walking along the back wall and hopped into the garden opposite next door, which then required me to call to the guy putting up curtains to come out and catch it for me. He did a fine job and proved to be a very pleasant chap as we became acquainted over pigeon passing. So back to today; that was what’s known as a flash back. The pigeon hopped onto a low overhanging branch and sat there. The cats of course were inside behind a locked cat flap. It scratched and preened but showed no signs of taking off. Meanwhile I could hear the cat flap being heavily tested by Britney. Tension mounted. Would the cat flap weaken; would Britney flash past me hardly able to keep up with her flashing white teeth of death? Would the brave plucky pigeon get plucked? Might Britney have turned her attentions to the oven door and got the chicken waiting to be roasted for our tea? None of these. I decided to return the pigeon to the shed. But now the pigeon could fly modestly and flapped into Pauline’s garden, next door but one, and perched on the trellis. Luckily I had to feed her cat, Chester, who is sixteen and no threat. To cut a long story imperceptibly shorter I caught it in her shrubbery. Now, though I could get out of Pauline’s with pigeon tucked under one arm, I was locked out of my own house, having climbed into next door’s garden and into Pauline’s. Bethmouse was in luckily. So the pigeon is now back in the shed. This one could run and run, which unfortunately cats can do far better than pigeons. 

Cats continue Ethnic Cleansing.

Where was I? 14.00 hours yesterday: The pigeon was in next doors shed recovering from Britney’s attentions. 15.30 hours: We find dead pigeon in next door’s front garden. I bin it and check shed. Our pigeon is still there. I muse whether this is Romeo and Juliet all over again as spouse dies of broken heart assuming her hero is dead. Erroneously as it happens seeing as he’s still in the shed. 16.00 hours: Mothermouse sees Britney acting suspiciously in the shrubbery. She’s got our pigeon again. Obviously she’s got in the shed and pursued it over the wall and into ours. I save it yet again! and put it in a cardboard box in our shed and padlock it. OK that’s not absolutely necessary but in situations like this one must not hold back one’s neurotic impulses, they’re far better expressed. 01.00 hours: (election night) Kafuffle. Domino has a mouse in the kitchen. Close door. Nothing to do, Dom eats his. 02.00 hours: another kafuffle in kitchen. This time it’s the cat food. The cup containing dry food had been left on the grill pan on top of the microwave. We put it there when the oven’s in use for ovening stuff. Now normally the cats knock the cup off onto the floor and eat it there, but this time they knock it over and the food falls through grill into the grill pan. Ha ha get out of that you big toothed, no opposable thumbs furry angels of death. 10.00 hours: (election day) Only one clear winner. The pigeon in our shed is alive and recovering well, and shit, which is always a good sign. So did you vote for the ‘survival of the fittest’ conservatives or the ‘stop persecuting pigeons’ labour party? I voted for the ‘lets all stop eating each other’ lib dems. Fat lot of good that did me. 

The Result. Not.

Well here I am, 8am watching the election keen to bring you a mouse’s opinion. In the real world I woke up needing a pee. David Dimblybe is beginning to slur, he must really need a pee by now unless the BBC’s fitted him with a bag. So the electorate have decisively voted for change according to the Conservatives; they’ve got 2 million more votes than Labour. But that’s proportional representation, which we don’t have yet and they’re against it anyway. So they’re all disappointed one way or another because the zeitgeist has proved, through our wonderful voting system, that ‘we’ all want them to be disappointed. If the electorate have ‘decisively voted for change’ that change is a clear message of, “Grow UP! We want honest cooperation.” I’ve never seen so many people with quite worrying mental difficulties. If one is to believe what’s coming out of their mouths they’re suffering from a sort of political autism (def: ‘an abnormal absorption with the self; marked by communication disorders and short attention span and inability to treat others as people’); a defendant in the dock who’s quite unaware he’s lying through his teeth to get a result even when it’s blatantly obvious to everyone else. It’s the expenses scandal all over again only this time it’s about the fundamental honesty of political rhetoric. It looks like none of the three major parties in any permutation can construct a majority so maybe the single Green in Brighton will hold the balance of power. And all the queues at polling stations due to ‘the surprisingly high student turnout.’ Hasn’t anyone told them any self-respecting student doesn’t go out before 10? To get the student vote you have to open 12 till 2 like Late Shopper. And preferably serve beer, fags and munchies. And a banana. (balanced diet) So as the [X] Factor of politics rumbles to the end of its tediously long season Nick comes third (like everyone thought Will Young would come second), Cameron comes first (like everyone thought Gareth Gates would), and the winner (like everyone knows is Simon Cowel) is Jeremy Paxman. Result.

Allowance for Job Seekers.

So lads tell me about yourselves. 

“I’ve got 5 GCSEs, one A, 2 B’s and a C; 3 A levels in English, media and political studies, and a degree in Media Management.”

“I’m the same with a degree in Environmental Studies.”

OK. Are you good with your hands? They smirk.

“How do you mean?”

Well mechanics, gardening, building, electrics, that sort of thing?

“I went on a field trip once and grew some tomatoes.”

And you?

“No.”

So what have you learned to do?

“Well I learned about running a recording studio.”

Oh you’re musical?

“No.”

You mean the technical side?

“No.”

Oh you mean accounts, scheduling, invoices, VAT and stuff?

“No accountants do that sort of thing.”

Oh, so what does a manager do?

“Der, he manages. He talks to the acts, makes sure everything’s alright and everyone’s doing what they should be doing. You know, managing.”

And what have you learned to do?

“It’s like our environment is very important and people should be very aware of it.”

But what have you learnt to do?

 “Well make people aware of our environment and how important it is.”

And how do you do that?

“Well you make people aware…”

Hold on, I know that. What have you actually learned to do on your degree course?

“Oh the course, oh education these days is not about producing factory fodder. We’re not trained to do ‘a’ job as such. It’s about, well it’s about education.”

Education is about education?

“Ye right.”

OK I understand now. Well I can’t offer you a job as such but I do have an opening for farm labourers. They usually know loads about nothing useful. Should be right up your street. 

Out the bathroom window.

So now we have a pigeon. Britney brought it in, bad Britney. He/she has lost a few feathers but looks fine. It can’t fly so is in shed and its mate is on roof waiting. It’s got better since yesterday but the better it gets the harder it is to catch. I’m hoping for a full recovery before mate gets a better offer. Last year a young crow was killed on the road. It was really sad to see parents morning their loss, cawing and very upset. Britney usually brings birds in alive so I have to catch them in the middle of the night and release them out of the bathroom window. 3 or 4 last year. Domino being a farm cat eats what he catches. Dave having only one eye can’t catch anything but will steal what the others bring in if he gets an opportunity. Betty doesn’t catch anything on account of she’s a girly girl airhead. We’re thinking of getting some chickens, which poses a question; who wins between a cat and a chicken? I’m thinking the chicken, but then knowing Britney I’ll probably find it in the bedroom in the early hours. There you go, the election is nearly over. George Osborn better not come in our garden; he’d be cowering under the dressing table in no time. And if I find him I’ll throw him out of the bathroom window. It worked for the others.

Psychotic Group Collusion.

I’ve started several blogs lately only for them to collapse into descriptions of economic misery or political malaise. OK it’s the election and our overdraft but there’s something behind it all, a prime mover behind the direction we’re travelling. It’s to do with ‘normalise’. The CIA called it ‘group think’ and my term for it is ‘Psychotic Group Collusion.’ Our brain is our inner isolated reflector of our environment. It has no absolute references; it simply makes itself up by ongoing conjecture. As a major part of our environment is other people and their conjectures we create between us a zeitgeist, a sea of mutually dependant conjectures. We have the facility to ‘all go mad together’, hence PGC. And more importantly, we have precious little capacity to realise it’s happening. The CIA convinced themselves there were WMDs, and our children are normalising the behaviour they see on television. Our politicians are all normalised to the ambience of parliament and the city is normalised to big bonuses. This normalisation process continues with time in all groups from family to whole societies. It is and has been occurring to our democracy and capitalism just as it did to socialism and communism. The Berlin wall didn’t fall because of a fault in communism but because communism had normalised communism out of communism. The name remained as the process changed. We still have a House of Commons when there are no commoners left in it, only professional politicians. Similarly capitalism, established to bring workers and capital together to utilise both effectively is now skewed towards capital chasing capital growth chasing capital, and excluding the vast majority of the population. Last year a few hedge fund traders in the US earned over $3 billion each, not from industry, or manufacturing or employing anybody, just simply trading. Our current normalised awareness of currency is not as promissory notes to enable fair exchange but purely as numbers that can be diverted into and from bank accounts by those smart enough to invent new ways of doing it. In fact they’re not even that smart, they just belong to a small group normalised to know how to and believe what they’re doing has no wider consequences other than to make them obscenely wealthy. Perhaps the Greeks are right to revolt against this normalised unfairness. But then we who are normalised to it will think they’re being unreasonable, even trying to bring down capitalism itself. But when there is precious little capitalism left in capitalism they may have a point.

Face of Technology.

Well last night Mothermouse was dealing with an earthquake and I got shot twice. We both coped well and survived till morning. That last earthquake we had I just thought the cat had jumped on the bed. Dave is a big cat to be fare. So dreams and perception are often not useful for coming to grips with reality. Most of our conclusions are made before they even reach our conscious awareness. The ‘I’ that I think I am is apparently half a second behind the man who makes all the decisions, whoever he is. Watching a gorilla with my 2 and 7 your olds years ago, the moment it threw itself at the glass parental care went out the window and a loud internal voice shouted, “Kick ‘em out the way and RUN Stiffy RUN!” But half a second later I did go back and pick them up. Now I don’t have a picture of that gorilla but I’ve hundreds of pictures on my computer going back to 1900 of holidays, parents and grandparents and stuff. I use Picasa from Google to organise them, which is really good. A week or so back I opened it and noticed top left was a folder entitled ‘People. Un-named, 2,805.’ Strange I thought. So I clicked on it and up came 2,805 perfect mug shots gleaned from all my photos. Along with family and friends were faces of the long since dead, passers by, the complete Methodist Church choir of 1907, Lady Gaga on a T shirt and a doll in a Greek shop window,  all perfectly framed like passports; all snipped out without me even knowing and placed on file. It came as quite a shock. All I can say is it’s a good job the powers that be don’t have this sort of technology.