A Lunch Date and a Leg Disaster.

Uttoxeter has a pigeon. Just one. At least, I think it’s just one because I only ever see one, and although she doesn’t wear a distinctive hat which sets her apart from the generality of pigeons, she does have a yellow ring on her right leg which is evidence of sorts – however inconclusive – that it’s the same pigeon.

So may we accept, for the sake of making this post slightly less boring than it otherwise would be, that Uttoxeter is possessed of a lone pigeon? Thank you.

She followed me today, bless her. She walked behind me from Greggs bake shop, where I’d bought a vegan sausage roll and a piece of bread pudding, all the way to the benches outside the town hall where I’m in the habit of eating my lunch. And, of course, she would have known that because she’s partaken of a few quite large crumbs which I’ve (accidentally) dropped there before. (I do hope you believe that my dropping of crumbs in the vicinity of a hopeful pigeon is purely the result of clumsiness. Those grey-suited people of wan aspect who sit behind wooden tables in airless offices pretending to be in charge of us generally disapprove of people feeding pigeons. That’s because they’re not proper people themselves, whereas I am. And bureaucrats do so like to find the means to punish proper people. Heaven preserve us from the ire of bureaucrats with chips on their shoulders. Metaphorical chips, that is, not the nice fried variety which can be purchased at relatively low cost from the chip shop further up the High Street.)

So, today I came over all clumsy again and lots of quite big crumbs fell to the ground in the vicinity of Millie the pigeon. (The name just came to me, probably because I have a special rapport with birds and always get their names right, albeit belatedly. Bureaucrats only have a rapport with rule books, by the way, never with birds.)

Now, is it realistic of me to suspect that Millie recognised her benefactor from the evidence of previous encounters, or would it be more sensible to assume that little Ms M has learned to follow everybody who emerges from Greggs bake shop carrying paper bags containing culinary prospects? I know which one I’m cooing for. And what was really nice was that Millie had no limp today, as she did the last time I had lunch with her.

The same could not, unfortunately, be said of me. The practice of walking around even a small town is becoming more and more of a trial these days, courtesy of my aching left leg and general fatigue (or heart problem, or lung problem, or chronic fatigue syndrome, or whatever it is.) I’m getting quite depressed about it.

When I arrived at Tesco today I went into their Costa franchise and bought a cup of coffee, simply as a means to have somewhere to sit for a while. I never take coffee in Tesco because Tesco isn’t the right kind of place to take coffee. Coffee should be taken in a proper coffee shop or one’s own home (or maybe somebody else’s home as long as it’s the right kind of somebody else.) Coffee is just too precious to be associated with a supermarket. But that’s what I did today, for the first time ever and to my eternal shame.

(And I just discovered that it’s possible to dance to Jupiter from Holst’s Planets Suite. If only I had the legs and energy.)