The Comfort of Pigeons.

I went for a run. It happens a lot with me - a way of managing my gluttony. Around about the half-way point of my usual 6 mile route, I encountered a woman in a flap. Her car was parked at the side of the road, engine running. Her car was a large silver 4 x 4 - the type that ensures her children's safety on the school run whilst imperilling the lives of their classmates. At the woman's feet laying a pigeon that she had just clipped with her big silver car.

'I couldn't avoid it', she said. 'It was just sitting in the middle of the road'.

As she talked, the pigeon turned circles on the pavement, beating the ground with its one good wing. There was a large puncture hole in its chest.

'Do you know where I can get a box from?' the woman asked me. 'If I could get a box, I could put it in my car and take it to the vet's', she said.

The vet's in my village is located less than a minute's drive away from where the pigeon lay.

I said, 'I don't have a box'. The woman seemed disappointed. 'But anyway,' I continued. 'The vet won't be able to do anything for it. It's a goner'.

My prognosis seemed to distress the woman a bit more. 'No,' she said, 'I think it will be all right if we can find a box'.

Fatefully, next to the pigeon there was a large, heavy stone that had once been part of a long-demolished wall.

I offered to drop the stone on the pigeon to put it out of its misery.

I have experience of euthanizing birds. Made redundant in his mid fifties, my father embarked on a  canary breeding business, carried out in the detached body of a Luton van 'parked' at the side of our house. He wasn't very good at it and most of his canaries developed serious neuroses. It's a thing with canaries apparently. My dad's flock started pecking off their own legs. Canary prosthetics or psychiatric services were hard to come by in 1970s Belfast what with all the shootings and bombings, so my Dad drowned the legless neurotic canaries in a white bucket, specially set apart for this job. In this avian euthanasia programme he recruited my brother and me. Obviously psychologically damaged by the Troubles, my brother and I were enthusiastic canary-drowners. One held the legless canary under the water until the musical bubbles stopped rising from its beak. So, when it comes to dispatching our feathery friends to their eternal home in the sky, I know what I am about.

'Hmm..' considered the woman. 'I wouldn't be comfortable with you dropping that stone on it,' she said.

I thought, 'It's not about your level of comfort'. But I didn't say it. I am a nice bloke.

By  this point the pigeon had now mastered the art of moving along the ground with one wing and had sculled itself into the hedge by the side of the road, its journey from the roadside marked with a sticky trail of blood.

'Oh', said the woman. 'It's better now.'

'No', I said. 'It's dragged itself into the hedge to die.'

Undaunted, the woman said, 'I'm still going to get it that box. It will provide it with shelter overnight and then, in a few days, it will get better and fly away.'

'Or die or be eaten by a fox,' I said.

The woman was beginning to tire of my pessimism and, perhaps, concerned that she had sought help from a psychopath

'I'll get that box', she said and got back into her big silver car. She thanked me and drove off. I noticed that hanging from her rear-view mirror she had a white cardboard dove. I recognised it as an air freshener given to customers of a local car wash staffed by asylum seekers from Afghanistan. It is rumoured that the staff are bonded slaves but as they charge £5 for a full wash and wax, no one cares. They charge more for a full valet but they're the cheapest around. Most cars in the village feature the same white dove, fragrantly bestowing its in-car serenity upon the stressed-out driver.

After the woman drove off, I went over to the heavy stone and picked it up. It was sufficiently heavy for the task. I walked over to the pigeon. But, by this time, it had secured itself deep under the hedge. There was not a clear drop from above onto its head.  I tried to hook the pigeon out from under the hedge with my foot to administer the coup de grace but I couldn't reach it. I placed the heavy stone back where I had found it and, crouching down by the hedge, I wished the pigeon a speedy death. Its eye was obscured by its inner eyelid but, otherwise, it looked calm.

Two days later, I ran past the spot where the pigeon had settled down to die. I looked under the hedge again but it wasn't there. A few yards further along, however, I noticed that someone had stuffed a large cardboard box into the hedge. Carefully, I pulled it out. It was very clean and empty.