I was on my way to the office – this was a few years ago – and as I walked out of the train station with all the other busy, cross, late people, my eye was drawn downwards to a hurrying pigeon. This was clearly a working bird also on its morning commute; you had only to look at the way it bustled along, not a minute to lose – I could almost hear it speculating whether it had time to pick up a flapjack and a white Americano from the coffee shop before the 9am forward planning meeting. It was a middle aged male pigeon, something in accounting was my guess, an underachieving, rather tubby little pigeon, in a little pigeon bowler hat and carrying a little pigeon brolly under his round little wing (there was a threat of drizzle). He was ever so earnest and pompous and slightly comical, although I felt bad for thinking him funny when he took himself so seriously. And I wondered why we look down on pigeons and think they are dirty pests, when they’ve been made what they are by the city they live in, just as we have; They eat the same junk food that we do, and they breathe the same grubby air. All they want is to put food in their beaks and take something home to the gaping chicklet mouths in their suburban nest. And so I’ve tried to be nice to them ever since, by which I mean defending them in conversation. I mean, I don’t know any pigeons to speak to. I don’t know if I’d date one.

Badger