On weekdays I go to the workshop and feed Robbie the Robin. I don't know if 'Robbie' is the affectionate diminutive of 'Robert' or if he is actually called 'Robin'. There is no point in asking him. His English is very limited.
At weekends, we go to the park and feed Cyril the Squirrel. Obviously, I don't need to ask him if this is the name he was given at birth. Cyril has about three or four other friends who come to be fed peanuts, but he is the most courageous and therefore the most successful. Consequently he is also the fattest, so is easy to recognise when compared to his scrawny mates. This is why I only know his name and haven't been bothered to learn the others.
Cyril is so courageous that when the peanuts run out, he climbs up your legs, sits on your lap, stands on his back legs with his front paws on your chest and stares into your eyes to make sure you are not lying when you tell him that there are no peanuts left.
This crisis has brought many people into the park who would not normally go there, and of those, many feed Cyril nuts. Cyril doesn't seem to care that peanuts are not officially classified as part of the true nut family. I'm not even sure he knows.
As of yesterday, the number of civilians who have died of Covid 19 has reached one third of all the civilians who died in Britain during the whole of WW2. People are comparing many aspects of the crisis to WW2, or the effect it is having on the population.
There is one big difference between the era of the Blitz and today though. There have been no significant food shortages leading to rationing as there was in urban Britain throughout the war.
In 1944, people would have gone looking for Cyril and used the peanuts as bait.
I remember reading some guidelines for the English spies dropped by air into occupied France which included the chilling instructions that when desperate cats and small dogs could be used as a source of food.
ReplyDeleteImagine that. An English spy ends up in your village and eats your dog and cat. No wonder the French regard the Brits with a degree of suspicion.
East Enders called cats 'roof rabbits'.
DeleteI was once telling someone that a squirrel had run up my trouser leg ... on the outside, I had to add.
ReplyDeleteIt was looking for nuts, I daresay.
DeleteYour nuts - GEDDITT????
DeleteEat squirrel? You have got to be joking - they are just rats with bushy tails.
ReplyDeleteThey are on the menu of a fancy London restaurant, Weave.
DeleteOur local butcher used to sell squirrel to order and provided a recipe for cooking it. We resisted the temptation.
DeleteYou need about three squirrels per head.
DeleteSquirrel is served in a few restaurants in Norfolk and has been since the late 1970s. It is normally served with pigeon.
ReplyDeleteUp until the 1950s, one pub near here served badger, but only once a year. Most scavengers ignore badger. Too strong.
DeleteI think I'd rather have an omelette.
ReplyDeleteWhose eggs?
DeleteSeagulls and pigeons. They're everywhere.
DeleteI've eaten coastal gulls eggs but I wouldn't want urban ones.
DeleteSo Cyril only is road kill by any other name.
ReplyDeleteThe grey squirrel population here came from America and drove out our native red squirrels, so they are not very popular with some people.
DeleteThere is a rogue population in other cities of very black squirrels. And aggressive. My brother used to describe how quickly they could confiscate the nuts of both grey and red squirrels, native to the east. The black fellows have moved fifty miles east in thirty years, and are in Hudson.
DeleteAre they bigger too?
DeleteThe black squirrels are smaller than grey and probably equal to the reds.
DeleteOh, don't we all need a little Cyril in our lives? Where I used to live a couple of years ago, two very fat male racoons would come to the back door to eat our leftovers. I called them the Brothers Karamazov. They probably lost some weight when we moved.
ReplyDeleteYou wouldn't want them moving in though.
DeleteI couldn't believe how cute and bold the grey squirrels were when I first came to London. I took countless crappy photos of them, and locals would roll their eyes. I was talking the other day with a neighbour about BSE, the ol' Mad Cow Disease that was the health controversy when I lived in the UK - I'm still prohibited from giving blood in Australia! - and from memory, Americans of a hillbilly persuasion used to get it from eating squirrel brains.
ReplyDeleteMaybe hill billies had squirrel brains?
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