WHISPERING SMITH: The birds

I grant you they can be annoying, waking you up all hours, scaring old people, making a mess of your car if you are daft enough to park beneath one. That said, they are part of the very fabric of our LA seaside town and those who complain, I rank with folk who move to the countryside and then moan about cawing crows, lowing cattle, bleating sheep and early morning crowing roosters!

To their credit, gulls do make super parents and, with all of their perceived faults, they do mean well. I for one wish them no harm, on the contrary in fact.

Driving through the Beaumont last week my friend spotted a young herring gull wobbling along the white line and dragging a tattered wing. We stopped, and my friend, with the help of a lady with a baby passing by, picked it up, dodged the frantic parent bird and legged it back to the car. We took the injured bird to the Fitzalan Veterinary Clinic. They checked it out, gave it a painkiller and sent it on to WADARS, those super folk who take in wounded wild critters.

Last we heard “Cliff” was doing very well and had been shipped off to Brent Lodge for some R&R. I suppose one seagull more or less isn’t a big deal, but it is important that everyone concerned made the effort.

LAY A LITTLE EGG FOR ME I walked into the St Barnabas charity shop last week and there on the shelf was a treacle-coloured china chicken, the kind you store eggs in. Been looking for one of those for ages, so I snapped it up.

Next day, my neighbour popped in for a coffee and I saw her staring at the chicken, enviously, I thought. Where had I got it, she asked me, examining the tiny mark on the tail? I told her LA’s St Barnabas shop, and that it had cost me eight quid, a bargain. She told me that she had donated it the day before and that she would have given it me had she known I coveted such a thing.

I thought about that for a moment, St. Barnabas needed the dosh, but who really donated the £8, me or my neighbour? What came first the chicken or the….?

MUSIC MAN Following the success of its last gig, LA’s New Inn is putting on another tapas evening on the 30th. They remind me of an early 70s evening, good food, conversation and background guitars. Back then, when everyone thought they could play and sing like Leonard Cohen, all that was missing was the blue smoke haze from the Gaulois and Gitanes.

Great Family Fun Day at Mewsbrook Park last week. All it needed was more forward publicity. That attractive open space is rapidly becoming an important little venue.

THE MAN FROM WINDY RIDGE I was born in a Rustington cul de sac called Windy Ridge, a name later changed to Wendy Ridge because, my mother told me, the word windy put folk off from buying houses there.

Pity that, it was such an apt name for a future western writer and, somehow, the man from Wendy Ridge lacks a certain boots ‘n’ saddle resonance, don’t you think?