Birth and Death
Today has been a bit of a mixed one.
I was woken up at 5am by screaming from the chin room. I went in there and had a quick, half-awake look around but couldn’t see anything wrong in particular, nothing obvious. Nobody had run out of water, no calls fro room service while I was in there. I put the calling down as being from Bramble the ultra-violet, probably screaming at the misbehaving triplets she is currently nursing. Later, in the early afternoon, whilst I was cleaning the cages out in the chin room I realised what it might have been. Zia was sitting awkwardly. As I looked closer I realised she’d had a baby earlier in the morning. It was her first. The baby was female and a black velvet, quite big and with silky dark fur. She looked sleepy but healthy and Zia was doing everything right.
As I continued to clean the chin room I could hear popping sounds. Next door had set up a firing range along the back wall of the garden and had started shooting at pottery and cans that had been lined up with and air rifle and what I can only assume must have been lead shot. I watched for a little while from the upstairs window not feeling particularly pleased, but it’s their garden, and I didn’t want to intervene at that point. I sometimes do archery but only with blanks (rubber stoppers on the ends of the arrows) and only at a pretty big target. The boys next door chatted for a while, then aimed just above the wall of the neighbours the other side of their house and started tracking, pausing for a while. I walked away from the window and and heard a sound which could only mean that they’d either hit something or come pretty close. Then it went quiet for a while. They must have gone inside.
Eventually I needed to take a break from cleaning the chin room and had to take 3 binbags downstairs and outside. J offered to carry the first and I followed downstairs with the second. I caught up to him in the kitchen. “There’s a seagull outside” he said. I heard what he said but it didn’t completely register. Was he suddenly afraid of gulls? I opened the door and indeed there was a gull right outside. It was lying on its belly on the floor spread-eagle, awake, alive, trying weakly to flap with one wing and then the other in order to get up but it was unable. Its breathing was strained, anaerobic breaths. The boys must have shot it down.
“I just said, there’s a dead gull outside,” J said.
“It’s not dead,” I replied.
One of the boys from next door came out of his kitchen into the back.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“What do you expect me to do with that?”
“What?”
“That.”
I signalled to the floor and he looked over the wall. He was pretty embarrassed by the situation, and the fact that the gull was in its death throws and not dead yet made it worse. He went to get a bag to put it in to get rid of it but it didn’t feel like the right thing to do while the gull was still alive. It was on its way out, beyond help. I folded its wings towards its body, scooped it up and carried it up some steps and laid it on the patio table in the long grass. I could not find an entrance wound. The lead shot was poisoning its blood. It lay there in the sunlight until the warmth of its body seeped away.
I told him to stick to shooting cans.
We will be mentioning this to the landlord.
Oh, what’s occuring? Barryokie!
Yesterday evening Scott Mills was down Barry Island with Radio 1.
I went down there for a little while and it was a bit busier than usual. I hadn’t been down to the island for a little while. They held the radio show in the Dolphin to a small audience of pink-wristbanded public that had been hanging around since the early afternoon. I had come home early from work but had arrived there too late to pick up a pair of wristbands. I didn’t know what Scott Mills looked like but once I had seen the photos I realised that I had walked past him, another guy and a photographer a little earlier in the afternoon. They had taken some good photos for the Radio 1 website. The pictures gave the place a sort of glossy-magazine look. Barry Island doesn’t usually look as nice as that to me, but maybe that is down to familiarity.
