THE SEAGULL

I’m not going to give a deep analysis of Anton Checkov’s The Seagull or the 70’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull nor Roald Dahl’s James and The Giant Peach or mad Eric Cantona’s statement that ‘When the seagulls follow the trawler it’s because they throw sardines into the sea.’ Pick the bones out of that.

Yes, Seagulls have had a good press. Until now. They killed a little dog. I’ve seen them snatch Pasties from people, ice creams, cod and chips, all during a stroll along the seafront in St Ives.

They grab pigeons drown them then gobble them up. Flip tortoises over and eat them. And yet, these buggers are protected. It’s all crazy. Okay, they are pretty, swooping around in the sky. But those gimlet black eyes tell a different story.

The roof in Brighton became a nesting place for these gulls. Always there. I wanted to get rid of them because they scared the grandchildren. I spoke to some roofers in a pub.

‘You get some bread,’ they said. ‘Squash some Alcaselzer in it. That’ll shift them.’

Get the stuff, mix it all up and prepare to throw it among the seething mass of birds but there were two baby gulls waddling around. I couldn’t harm them, could I? So I called up John the Bird man.

He fixed up a sound system that emitted Falcon sounds and various other bird calls that would scare the gulls off. It worked for a while. But then a man from the Council came round.

‘Those noises are keeping people awake in the afternoons.‘ So I had to turn it off.

There have been reports in the paper about the Brighton Council banning smoking on the beach. Maybe that’s the answer.

Get some whizz kid with all the know-how on YouTube to fake gulls flying around with fags in their beaks. That should get the Council out with their popguns blasting the flying smokers out of the sky.

Even their precious seagulls aren’t immune from the self centered rights of the do-gooders.

Then...Ha, ha, job done. Hopefully.