Animal magic

This morning I went for a brisk walk around Burgess Park. It was like being in an episode of ‘the really wild show”. At the entrance by the bins there was a bit of a feeding frenzy going on. A feeding frenzy that at first glance I thought involved a family of squirrels ( funny how we think squirrels are quite sweet ) but then realised they were in fact three very large rats. At that moment a rather stout woman happened to be passing and when she saw the rats she threw her shopping bag into the air and screamed, then jumped right into the path of an oncoming cyclist, sending the poor man flying. Luckily he was unharmed but the woman was completely hysterical and having what Jane Austen would have described as an attack of the vapours. I helped her to one of the large tree trunks that line the old tarmac road where she  sat down and then I  gathered up her shopping which was scattered all over the ground. I left her to it and headed up towards the lake

Somebody had thrown pieces of bread across the scrubby grass by the playground and the crows were busily hopping about eating the crusts, their black feathers iridescent in the morning sunshine. It reminded me of the crow man, a strange and rather scary individual who, years ago, used to come to the park with bags of meat , carrying an extremely large and equally scary looking knife. He used to stand in the middle and call the crows. Then he would delve into his bag , pull out a piece of meat and proceed to cut it up into pieces and throw it to the cawing crowd. It was a little like a Tibetan sky burial with crows rather than vultures and mercifully, no dead bodies but I often wondered who he was, and why he carried such a large bag of meat.. perhaps he was butcher ( or a mass murderer?). 

The person I have always longed to bump into , and who I have on reliable  authority is not a fiction of someones fevered imagination is the duck man. He has a trolley ( of the sort kids play with in American films in their denim dungarees) and on the trolley are a pair of ducks. Yes, its true. He takes them to the lake where they jump off the trolley and jump into the water, while he sits down on a bench with a flask of coffee and a sandwich ( ok, I made that bit up). When they , or he , have had enough he calls them and they hop out, hop back on the trolley and off they go back to his flat. Sadly and despite many hours lingering hopefully by the lake I have yet to behold this wonderfully eccentric Camberwell phenomenon.

However,  the mouse man used to be a regular sight on Camberwell Green, viewed with fascination and horror in equal measure by passers by. On first  glance he just looked like a shabby old man, but on closer inspection , and if you watched him for a while you suddenly realised that bits of his clothing were moving. Suddenly a mouse would appear from under his shirt and scamper under his hat, followed by another, and another, much to the delight of small children and any passing cats.

When I was doing a job in St Petersburg we had an evening off to ourselves. It coincided with an event called the white night which was when it didnt get dark at all and on this particular evening all the bridges down the river were raised and all the boats passed through them hooting their horns and letting off bangers. I was standing watching this when I noticed a man next to me with a cat perched on its head. At first I thought it was a furry hat but it was definitely a cat. A performing cat. He then proceeded to do a whole routine which involved acrobatics with the cat balancing on one finger, on his foot, then throwing the cat into the air and the cat landing, holding his paws together in  a doughnut shape, as if he was on a hoopla stall at the fair. 

In a moment of madness I once bought a pygmy hedgehog as a present for my dear friend M. As is usally the case I didn’t do my homework before purchasing and it soon became apparant that Oscar as he was called was not going to be the perfect match for M’s household. Firstly, he hated noise . M has two perfectly normal and noisy children. Secondly he should never be kept in a household with a dog. Yes, you’ve guessed it. Anyway to cut a long story short we ended up being the owners of this sweet looking but deeply annoying creature. He didnt like being handled ( so out the window went all the FB photo opportunities of pygmy hedgehogs in hats and having baths) . Whenever you went near him he started to hiss, a bit like a boiling kettle. I spent a fortune at Pets at Home buying live meal worms and then even more of a fortune getting the inside of my car cleaned after a tub of these delightful meal worms tipped up and got down every crack and crevice in the back. In the end however, Pets at Home came to the rescue. A very nice man called John, who for reasons known only to the inner workings of Pets at Home was actually wearing a guinea pig outfit when he served me  enquired why I was buying meal worms. ” For my pygmy hedgehog” I explained. He clapped his ( guinea pig) hands together and exclaimed that he had ALWAYS wanted a pygmy hedgehog. Well, John it was your lucky day. Oscar was packed off and still lives to this day in Croydon, happily hissing by the stove. 

And I cannot finish this piece without mentioning the most famous and well loved character of our Camberwell years, sadly no longer with us. Dogman, yes, Dennis Dog, he of the shorts and the lard and the herd of unruly yapping dogs tangled together with baler  twine. 

Some of you may have read the piece and the ballad I wrote in his honour. I wonder what he would have had to say about the cafe that stands on his old doorstep. Where you can buy a crushed avocado sandwich for £6.50.