The Scarecrow

Ever since I put new lawn seed down, pigeons have started treated the garden as an all-day breakfast buffet. Goose is useless. Cats are supposed to scare birds away, but he’ll walk past the pigeons, give them a side glance as if to say ‘morning’ and carry on.

As a result, I decided to make myself a scarecrow. Having just cleared out the garage, I had a stack of bamboo canes that were destined for the dump and selected two of them, which I formed into a makeshift cross. Then I tried to remember knots from my brief period in the scouts. In my head, I pictured wrapping twine alternately top left to bottom right and vice versa. I had the knot. Now all I needed was the twine. A brief search of the house revealed that, just as I thought, I had no twine. I also realised I didn’t really know what twine is. Is it just string? String with bits in? It didn’t matter. I didn’t have any string either. Somehow, I’d never got any in, not having anticipated the need to make a scarecrow.

A quick search of the garage floor, however, revealed some tiny scraps of wire that had previously been used to tie back climbing plants against the fence. Another brainwave. There might be some still on the plants. The next few minutes saw me frantically peering into bushes all round the garden, in full hunter-gatherer mode, collecting tiny scraps of wire as though they were berries. Goose looked on in amusement.

Eventually, I had enough scraps to try and fasten my two pieces of bamboo together. I carefully twisted the wire around the canes in a similar, but much more incompetent, version of the knot I had seen in my head. Surprisingly, it held. I planted the base firmly in the soil and stood back to admire my work.

I now had a wicker cross firmly planted in my back garden. It couldn’t have been more sinister if I’d set fire to it. It was definitely guaranteed to scare off the birds though. It was certainly making me think twice about going in the back garden.

Thinking fast, I ran upstairs to grab a hat and an old t-shirt. With a quick bit of mannequin work, it was done.

Goose came outside to survey my handiwork.

“That’ll do,” he seemed to say. “That’ll do.”