Antisocial behaviour

Cambridge can be quite a dangerous place to live. As I have documented earlier, there are the very bad cats who jump out at you from all directions and weave round your legs in a fashion contravening all health and safety directives. There are the tourists with enormous cameras who think it is an excellent idea to be walking along and then stop suddenly and crouch down so they can take photographs of something bizarre like a road junction, and that no-one will be inconvenienced or trip up over them. There is Partner, who is not friendly, and who I suspect sometimes says choice words to tourists who do this, especially when I am not there to supervise him, instead of just tutting in an annoyed manner like I do, which is the proper British way. And then there are the swans.

A swan pretending to be innocent. They aren't innocent

In Cambridge the river is quite a big presence and a lot of the time it is full of boats, often punts full of people thinking they are Sebastian Flyte (OK, I know that was Oxford). And that is lovely, especially if they want to take their enormous cameras with them and not photograph road junctions and trip me up. Or there are students rowing. There are also a lot of swans. The boats annoy the swans very much, because it is their river and the boats are interlopers and they are quite furious. However, in recent years a swan hero has emerged. I do not know if he was elected by some form of swan consensus or if he just rose to prominence because of natural swan superiority but, since 2009, Mr Asbo the Swan has been terrorising rowers and boats. It has obviously been a contentious issue because on the one hand there are the people who Mr Asbo has had a go at who are very frightened and want him relocated, and on the other there are people forming under a banner of Rights For Swans, Swans Were There First etc etc. It is like the Montagues and the Capulets or like Al-Amin and Sainsbury’s although I do think possibly Al-Amin’s case may have been boosted recently by a Cambridge woman finding glass in her Sainsbury’s Basic Sausage, but I digress. (Actually I will digress further and tell you that my mother once found glass in a Sarah Lee Gateau and ate it by mistake and bled. So I came home with the news that I had passed my driving test to find my mother hacking up blood in the sink, upstaging me as usual. She complained. We got vouchers. Here is a recipe for a nice easy non-Sarah Lee chocolate cake, you do not have to add glass unless you want to).

Anyway there is a sad postscript to Mr Asbo, which is, he has a bad toe and has had to be removed from the river, although he seems now to be recovering well. But, what new Animal Avenger will emerge in Cambridge? I will be keeping a close eye on the very bad cat down the road and also the collared dove, who now actually hovers over me when I am outside if I have not put his nuts out quickly enough. We are very close to nature here, which as you know is red in tooth and claw. Things can turn very quickly.

Get well soon, Mr Asbo!