By: Blonde Two
Mr Blonde Two and I were up at dawn today to start our journey to Austria. A couple of musings about this odd time of day to follow:
At home (I have been away so much recently that I feel the need to mention being at home), I have seagulls nesting on my roof. As a girl growing up in land-locked Worcestershire, I used to envy my channel island cousins their seagulls. Now they are a part of everyday life.
The Youth Hostel in Liverpool is a welcoming place and the staff there got us out of a sticky situation on our way home from the Isle of Man (thanks guys). Our only complaint would be the seagulls at dawn, or at least we Blondes presume that they were seagulls. After being forced to shut our window to shut out their cacophonous 4 a.m. raucousness , Blonde One suggested that they might have been pterodactyls after her socks which were hanging out of the window to dry. She may well have been right, the seagulls on my roof have never sounded quite so angry and have soft, Devonshire accents.
Interestingly, we did, in the end find two (one shown below) pterodactyls. They were perched on the top of the Liver Building and had been tied down to stop them from escaping to wreak dawn-time terror and steal Blonde socks. Research suggests that the Liver Birds (you are allowed to admit to being old enough to remember the sit-com) are actually cormorants but I think this is just a promotional ploy on the part of the tourist authorities.
This, of coursè,, is a gross defamation of all pterodactyls, whose wings were mainly membrane and unfeathered, and who therefore did not need to perch on the top of the nearest pinnacle and spread out their feathered wings to dry, a habit of which cormorants are much enamoured. As to the munching of socks in the small hours of the morning, may I respectfully suggest that socks might not then have come into existence, as their present owners had not at that time been invented? Life must have been so much simpler then,
You will be happy to know that Malvern has its own (inland) seagulls nowadays. Worcester has a gull problem as well as the pigeon population that always has been there. Seagulls have moved in scavenging on the food carelessly and thoughtlessly chucked around by humans. When I was young we used to only see them on seaside holidays but we didn’t have spare food to drop when it was rationed! Locally, the yard of the school you attended now has it’s own gull population after break times. They are sometimes the first birds I hear in the morning! x