Agressive seagulls and angry politicians have a lot in common - Susan Morrison
Seagulls and politicians have a lot in common. They both seem to whirl about pointlessly, make an incredible amount of noise and get wildly excited by the prospect of free food.
At least the political class can’t fly. This is a good thing, since seagulls are the avian equivalent of the Lancaster bomber. Permanently locked and loaded, these airborne pests are ever ready to seek out the newly washed car.
Gawd help us if the MSPs took to the air. I suspect it would take more than a wet wipe to get that off your bonnet.
And don’t think that you’re safe driving away. The casual bombs-away of the Great Screaming White Pest can catch you on the windscreen and almost always on the driver's side.
Never deploy the wipers to clear that mess. Gull poo is super smeary, a serious issue if you are hitting 80 on a motorway. Fortunately, here in Scotland, we’ve neutralised that problem. Most of our urban motorways are in a state of semi-permanent repair work. Getting above 40 is a day to celebrate.
The worlds of politics and gulls can sometimes collide. During the referendum campaign in 2014, Jim Murphy took himself up to Oban to make the case for Better Together.
A friend who was there that day recalled that the weather was glorious. Jim was in shirt sleeves. Daring Obanites were exposing their legs to the sun, but not for long.
Within a few minutes of Jim starting, a man wearing a cagoule appeared, carrying bags of chips. Some in the crowd were clearly in the know. Umbrellas appeared on that cloudless day.
Cagoule man sauntered behind Mr Murphy. Then, like a farmer sowing his fields, did cast his chips wide upon the carpark tarmac. Within seconds, every gull within a 20-mile radius came screaming in for the feed. Within minutes, Glaswegian gulls were muscling in on the buffet.
There were, according to my friend, ‘hunners’ of gulls. Every single one was fully loaded for projectile bombing and when it came to ‘bombs away’, they did not miss.
It was a perfect storm of flying feathers, chips and crap. Jim fought manfully on, but it was useless. He gallantly admitted defeat to the Seagull Whisperer of Oban.
Now, I don’t care if even David Attenborough shows us gull parents feeding cute gull babies, these things are a pest. The people of Eyemouth are being terrorised by seagulls that have been using Hitchcock's ‘The Birds’ as a training video.
Do not for a split second buy the line about those birds being feather-brained. My husband was once savagely attacked by a gull that had cast a beady eye on him while buying a pot of seafood.
The gull that whacked him didn’t grab the flying prawns; a wingman flew in and snatched the prize in mid-air. This is what we should fear. Team work.
The ones in Aberdeen are the size of pterodactyls, and sit on the roof of cars belonging to small Glaswegian women and eye them up, clearly with a view to carrying said wee wumman (me) back to feed those gull babies.
So I for one am glad that our politicians are taking this winged menace so seriously they are willing to shove each other about and screech aggressively, which, let's face it, is seagull behaviour.