Now don’t get me started on the geese. In Australia you’d say they could do with a cull but for reasons that baffle, the UK Goose is all too precious and now the gaggle is larger than ever. Too many years of easy bread which leads to easy breeding and these birds don’t fuck around with fucking around. They’re winged rabbits. I can’t believe I’ve lived here long enough to say this but I recall Bedford having eight or nine good looking, well behaved, hard working geese that clocked in at dawn and knocked off at dusk. Honourable geese they were, complimenting the stoic nature of the ducks. A honk here, a quack there, the river had balance. But now there’s hundreds of these needy squawking gandering pricks all waiting for someone else to lay the golden egg; softer than the pillows they’re soon to become. Their days are spent harassing the river bank looking for cheap and easy crumbs. It’s our fault of course. We let it happen. Every day you’ll see a traumatised toddler being encouraged by their stupid parents to hand feed, what is to the child, a bird the size of an ostrich. And it’s never the one goose, there’ll be thirty or forty shuffling up wanting a chunk of the terrified kid’s stale rye. And god help the little sod if he runs out of crust but doesn’t have the leg speed to make it back to mum and dad because, let me tell you, it gets ugly. They say a kid was hoisted for thirty yards a while back. Left upside down in a tree. As old man Jenkins says, “It won’t be long before a three year old makes the news”. A sentence that does nothing to stop the town thinking he might be a paedo. Regardless, people need to start heeding the signs. They're right there, clear as day. One up shot of the economy tanking is pretty soon, those same sign’s might read ‘Don’t Eat the Geese’.
