Seagulls and Trains
Several years ago (seven exactly in fact), I used to commute to work by train. Now, I had to catch a connection at a local station, and it’s a ‘regional rail’ type station. You know the sort, it’s in the middle of fuckingnowhereton.
In it’s glorious hey-day, it had been very busy, and thus has huge long platforms capable of accommodating trains with dozens of carriages, but alas no more, it’s run down and no one ventures into the darker, dimmer further reaches of its platforms, except I that is…
You see, I used to have to wait for a train connection at this station, and it invariably meant waiting around for forty minutes with nothing to do, so I’d shamble about the various platforms like something out of “Night of the Living Dead”, board, and impatient, and one day I chanced upon a dead seagull.
This thing had been walloped by a train, and was battered and splattered all over the railway sleepers. Not especially gross, oh no, that came later. Two days later.
Two days had passed, and, there was I, roaming the station once more, when I went to see if the dead seagull was still there. I figured its remoteness from the central part of the station would mean it would remain unmolested for weeks.
It was there alright, only now it had company. A second, badly injured seagull was next to it. Struck by a train while cannibalistically feasting upon the rotting flesh of the first. Rough justice, if you ask me.
I fucking hate seagulls, otherwise I may have done something about it, other than just visit it several times over the course of the following two weeks, to see how it was getting on. You’d be surprised how long a crippled bird can eek out its existence when it has a ready supply of rotting bird meat. It lasted for ages.
( Halibut If you think education is expensive, try crack., Fri 22 Jun 2007, 12:42, Reply)