Swan's Way

Mr Asbo, and Abs-son

Not members of a large and notorious sink estate family.

Swans.

Mr Asbo was a famously stroppy swan, given to fits of hissing and pecking (if anyone dared to get within pecking range). His boy, Abs-son, is, apparently, even worse-tempered and hissy-fit-prone.

I had an absolutely lovely conversation recently. It went like this:

“Thanks for the ticket [to the game], if you don't want anything for it...”

“No. I insist...”

“Then I'll drop a few quid into your preferred charity.”

PAUSE

“We only do animal charities.”

“All the better.”

“I work with people all the time. I hate them.”

Here I looked at the table he was with, and glanced at DLL.

“Present company excepted, of course.”

There's those urban myths:

“Watch out for those swans, son, they can break a grown man's arm with one blow of their wings.”

Not unless they've studied Kung Foo, they can't. Maybe an extremely small man's arm. If he has brittle bones. For such beautiful, serene-looking creatures, they have an awful reputation for bad-temperedness, yet they always seem able to peacefully accept some plastic white bread without taking my fingers with it when I hand feed them.

The simple fact is that, left alone, the swans would be quite happy. They don't need, in advertising industry terms, our input. They'd probably rather we stayed the hell away from them and let them be. We nick their habitats, force our attentions upon them, then go on about how uppity they are. Why on earth are they not pleased to see us? Us! God's chosen children.

It is a brave thing to say, about supporting only animal charities. I copped bit of a lecture from one of BLISS' friends' husband about that. He'd recently lost his father to cancer, and didn't think money should be given to anything else until advances in diagnosis and treatment were funded and made. I didn't argue. It seemed too raw a nerve, and I wasn't going to change his mind in a million years. There was the uproar last year when the RSPCA spent big on prosecuting a fox hunt. What the papers and the popular media (the BBC included) didn't promote as particularly newsworthy was that the taxpayer funded and supposedly politically neutral agencies, the police and the crown prosecution service, repeatedly let hunting go on, turned blind eyes, and said that they'd never get a conviction in court. The RSPCA are one for one in that respect, blowing the assertions of the cops and their prosecution service out of the water, and giving grounds for doubting their neutrality and bias. Lets face it, the boys in blue will always support the red-coated inbred unspeakables, and rush to give a beating to the muddy hippies in the combat greens, whether they're protesting about hunting, the new motorway, or shooting badgers.