Pet Sounds

Let's take a moment here and be silly.

In fact why just a moment? Why not a minute? Or an hour? A week? To hell with it - it's time to go the whole hog and have a silly season.

This is clearly the path of thought which great media minds of yore stumbled along as they enjoyed a convivial pint in a Fleet Street boozer on a lazy early Summer day. It was probably the start of the same drinking session which led to a national newspaper thinking it was a jolly lark to put ubbs on page 3, but that's another story.

We are deeply embedded in the silly season at the moment, with schools on holiday and Gordon browning himself on a beach (geddit?) we have to look to more unusual sources of news.

It seems that the bizarre is coming to us however, as we have had a spate of bizarre animals bothering the people of Brent. This week started with a lady calling in saying there was a large African parrot in her garden refusing to come down from its tree (the parrot that is, not the lady, I think she was calling from her house, though it could have been a treehouse, you should never assume).

After our reporter Tom Lawrence had discussed the finer points of parrot etiquette (apparently it's impolite to call them Polly on first meeting) the lady revealed she did not wish to have her name in print and the story crumbled around our ears. You would be amazed how often this happens, but if you think about it if we wrote stories with anonymous people in them we could make up any old nonsense (for a good example of this see those columns in more low-brow papers which begin with things like: "Which boy band star has a second nose growing out of his armpit?,,,").

Having been left distinctly dejected by the loss of our squawking story spirits were only raised by the appearance of a reptilian member of the menagerie which is clearly loose on Brent's streets. As he prepared to head off to work on Monday morning Aqeel Bashir was confronted by a rather nasty looking serpent slithering around his hallway.

In my books this is the time to run far far away, all the way to Australia if you can manage it (where apparently they don't have any snakes), and write your house of as an unfortunate loss. However Aqeel and his mum chose the other option and chased their viperous visitor into a bucket before calling for help.

This obviously makes a cracking story, but it does make me wonder what we're going to have discovered next. A lion in the loo? A walrus in the washing machine? Maybe a bonobo in the bedroom (okay, I'll stop now). Whatever the next P T Barnhamesque offering I await it with anticipation and long may the silliness continue.

As an interesting footnote, as our erstwhile Mr Lawrence concluded his interview with Aqeel he happened to mention that his was not the only tropical animal to turn up in the borough this week only to be met with the reply: "Oh really? My mate lost a parrot the other day..."