So, I bumped into the Bergson woman again. I told her about the positive feedback here at Charlotte St. Curiously, she was already aware of it. At that point a pigeon interrupted our chat, trying to land on the table. It was a particularly manky (as we say in Bradford) specimen, with a sort of retractable abscess in place of a leg. She wondered why no one had yet invented a device for hoovering up pigeons. I thought the idea ridiculous for the simply reason that you’d end up taking out other small animals. ‘What, small animals in Central London?’ she retorted. ‘Yea, squirrels.’ ‘Squirrels!?’ ‘Sure, they’re being increasingly forced into urban centres in search of food’. But she insisted that the hoovering up would be confined to places like Trafalgar Square or Soho Square. ‘Well, I did once see a polecat in Soho Square’. She looked incredulous, and I had to admit that it was on a lead, the pet of some archly eccentric bohemian, and would doubtless escape the attentions of the hoovering device. I tried another line of questioning: ‘would the pigeons be killed in the hoover bag or released elsewhere?’ ‘Oh, released elsewhere, miles away, in some remote piece of countryside where there’s no dried vomit to peck at, see how they cope!’

Once I was at a café in Highgate when a flightless pigeon bobbed under our table. It had no legs to speak of, but a rancorous opening in it its belly. Still, like some automaton it continued pecking at random debris. A diner complained about its presence and one of the chefs came and placed a box on top of it, slid some cardboard under the box, took the thing away and placed it under a nearby tree. What a way to die.

ps am moving, and won't have proper internet access until thursday.