26 SEPTEMBER 1931, Page 10

Considered Trifles

FROM TFIE PIGEON'S POINT OF VIEW.

People talk and talk, and the financial situation is still about as clear to me as the dome of St. Paul's at midnight before the flood-lighting began. You hear this opinion and you hear that, but in every case it is a human being speaking, and human judgement is proverbially fallible. A day or two ago, deaved and doited with it all, I decided that it would be refreshing, at any rate, to examine an entirely new point of view. So I jumped on to a No. 11 bus and went and inter- viewed one of the City pigeons—a particularly fat and blue one, whose favourite feeding ground is just outside the Royal Exchange.

Well," I said, " and what do .you fellows think of the whole affair ? " " Don't like it," he replied portentously.

Don't like it at all. You never know where you are in this district nowadays, with the Stock Exchange opening and shutting and opening and shutting like a bird that's got the gapes. When they all turned up last Saturday morning we thought we were going to be in clover : but look what happened on Monday ! Of course, it isn't so much the stoek- brokers themselves who feed us, though they're very nice gentlemen, very nice indeed if I may say so, and always a kind word for us as they go by : but the typists and lady secretaries—those are the ones we really count on for a nice handful of bread every day, and that's why we don't like all this uncertainty."

" By the way," I continued (as tactfully as possible, for I felt that it was a delicate subject), this ridiculous campaign about there being too many of you. . . . That professional rat-catcher fellow that the L.C.C. put on to try to—er--

thin you out " " Huh ! " said the pigeon, puffing out his feathers and looking more than ever like a fat alderman himself. " We don't need to worry • our heads about hint, poor man. All this summer he's only managed to catch about three hundred of us—and those must have been mental defectives, so they're better out of the way. You see, the public's on our side, and they keep on going for 'him with umbrellas. . . . I admit I had a narrow squeak one day, though, when he'd spent about a week making friends with us and then tried to work a dirty trick with a concealed net. However, just at the critical moment a dear old lady popped out from a doorway and exploded a paper bag to scare us away. You ought to have seen his face. But she was as pleased as Punch, dear old soul, and if ever she finds herself in a similar predicament I'll be proud to do the same for her."