h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I awoke this morning to a funny scratching and rustling sound coming from the pavement outside my house. I opened the curtains to find that a bag of rubbish that I had put outside yesterday had been attacked and destroyed by some effing seagull, leaving rubbish strewn all up and down the street!

Now us Brighton folk are usually pretty cagey about putting out rubbish early, precisely because of this problem with the local wildlife. However I thought this bag would be fine as it contained no food, just the rubbish from inside my car. How wrong was I.

I've now been out and picked up all the (now soaking wet - it's raining) garbage from the street and rebagged it. The new bag is now sitting in my kitchen and I think I'll hand it personally to the refuse collectors next week.

On a happier note, I won on the National Lottery last night

The link between Brighton Seagulls and rubbish is well known to all English fans.

How much did you win?

The winnings? Only £10 sad to say. So no retirement plans for me this weekend.

No charter flight to Texas on Concorde then?

I suggest you bought for £10 seagull poison.

Are seagulls edible? Then I might have another option for you to get rid of your airborne plague .

We've got new neighbours on our street.

The furniture van parked up half way down the road late on Friday morning, where upon the crew started disgorging the lorry's contents into the happy couple's new (and ludicrously overpriced) home.

The problem is, is that 'late Friday morning' is precisely the time that the local dustmen do their rounds down our way. They would have turned the corner, spotted the road totally blocked by one of Pickford's finest, backed up around and carried on with the rest of their round. Then marked the road down as one for another crew to tackle on Monday. Thus leaving 90 or so houses (plus one church) with their rubbish bagged up on the street all weekend.

Cue feeding frenzy...

Practically every bag on the street has been smashed up by those f*cking birds. There are tin cans, teabags, munched up chicken wings, bits of paper, filled nappies, unidentifiable food particles, bills from the gas man, empty take-away containers, credit card receipts, flattened cola & beer cans, some soiled sanitary towels and at least one condom (used) strewn all the way up and down the road. The weather is warm, and it is starting to stink.

The gulls are strutting around like they own the f*cking place. Which to be frank, right now, they do.

That all sounds so horribly familiar...
I go out to a similar scene nearly every week, especially as Torbay Council's contractors apparently believe that paying Council Tax entitles you to only one collection a month - if you're lucky.

I have it on very good authority that seagull is not very good to eat. Although there's a fair bit of meat to be had on your average Herring Gull, it's very oily and has a gamey but (as you might expect) rather fishy taste. All in all, fairly rank, in fact.

i would think, at least after reading this journal, that they would taste more like garbage.

for some reason when i saw this title i assumed it would be a rant on pigeons. oh well, to each continent its own flying rats.

do you not have outdoor garbage cans over there?

Rubbish bins vary from place to place over here depending upon the whim of the local council who's job it is to collect the contents.

Where I live it just wouldn't be practical as my street is entirely made up of terraced houses. So there is no access from the front of the house to the back, without walking through the house. Also my front door opens directly on to the pavement, so there would be nowhere to put the bin at the front of the house.

Therefore it's black plastic bags for us lot


On a happier note, the dustmen have been round and collected the rubbish bags this morning. But they haven't yet got round to sweeping up the detrious that was disgorged from the bags by the gulls' assault.

that would be the homeowner's responsibility in this neck of the woods. our garbage men do well enough to return the cans to an approximation of the correct address without having to bother with all the stuff they drop, much less anything that was strewn prior to their arrival.

and i pay for this kind of service!