I have something to admit. I’m scared of pigeons.

There we go. I’ve admitted it now, and I’m sure I’m not the only one out there who is terrified of them. Send me a tweet (@PobBoyBanned) if you’re one of them and together we can form a support group.

Over the past few years I’ve managed to control my fear as it’s just not practical to live in London and run screaming from every pigeon that crosses your path. I’d never get anywhere. These days what happens is I will clock a pigeon out the corner of my eye, stop talking so I can concentrate, hold my breath to stop me visibly panicking, and then power walk my way out of the situation.

But why? Well pigeons are very unpredictable. They will be flying along in a nice straight line, then must hiccup or something and dive towards you, before rescuing their flight path and avoiding collision by just a few inches. Or if they are on the ground, they bob around eating grit thinking it’s bread, apparently unfazed by the hundreds of other people walking right past them, but as soon as they encounter your foot within a metre of them they decide to literally poo themselves as they accelerate towards your face in a flapping feather fury. And sometimes they are perched on something above you, cocking their head with curiosity as they watch you walk along, but as you pass below them they do a quick 180 spin and pop out a dollop of pigeon poo, timed to perfection to land on you.

My worst encounter with a pigeon was when I was driving through Cheltenham town centre on my own during the summer a few years ago. It was very warm so I had both front windows down all the way and I was enjoying having my music nice and loud. I stopped at a pedestrian crossing when the lights went red, and then the next thing I knew a pigeon had swooped down from up high and flew straight through the open window of my car. The main issue being that it failed to make it out the window on the other side. There were a lot of pedestrians using the crossing that I had stopped at, and it must have been fairly obvious to them that something was going drastically wrong inside my car as feathers were flying out the windows, the car was rocking from side to side as I battled with trying to evict the creature whilst protecting myself from tasting it in the process, and I’m fairly sure my screams were clearly audible over the sound of my car stereo. It became apparent to me that the only way out of this situation was to exit the car myself. To those watching the spectacle, they would have seen the driver door fly open, and then an exhausted body just fall to the ground as I jumped out. Luckily the now larger hole in the side of the car (my open door) was enough for the pigeon to use to depart seconds later, allowing me to stand up gracefully, dust myself off, climb inside the now filthy interior, put my seatbelt on and get ready to go. But by this time the lights had turned green, and were now turning back to red, so I had an agonisingly long wait sat in front of the spectators before I could drive away from the scene.

THAT is why I am scared of pigeons.

Love from Pob x

Tags: blog, boy banned, boybanned, cheltenham, cheltenham town centre, pigeons, Pob

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2011 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Pob. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.