Barmy Britain (8 page)
Authors: Jack Crossley
In September 2007 it was reported that Chancellor Alistair Darling’s cat Sybil had moved into No.10 Downing Street. The Sun remembered how Winston Churchill had a ginger tom called Jock which slept on his bed and attended wartime Cabinet meetings. When he was writing his memoirs Winston had a budgie perched on his head, the cat on his lap and a poodle across his feet.
Sun
Hens have a way of coping with over-amorous cockerels that may be familiar to many women. They give them what they want first thing in the morning to avoid being pestered later, scientists have found.
Daily Telegraph
Advert in local paper: ‘LOST – Grey Cat. Answers to Lucy or Here Kitty, Kitty’.
Richard Flaugher,
Reader’s Digest
A white cat in Wolverhampton regularly jumps aboard the number 331 bus and gets off two stops later.
No one knows why he does this, but it may have something to do with the fish and chip shop at its destination.
Independent on Sunday
Percy, a 120-year-old tortoise, keeps neighbours awake by heading a football against his garden fence in Brighton, Sussex.
Sun
Some years ago the Portsmouth Evening News hailed the Queen’s successful exhibition of her Jerseys with the headline: M
AJOR
S
HOW
A
WARD
FOR
W
INDSOR
C
OW
.
Portsmouth Evening News
The Great Yarmouth Sea Life Centre has acquired a South American snapping turtle, described as ‘a tropical variety with a vicious bite and a temper to match’. It will be known as Prescott.
Norwich Evening News
There’s a seagull in Aberdeen which likes to dine at his favourite corner shop. He makes a daily stop there, hopping from foot to foot until staff open the door. Then he strolls in and helps himself to tortilla chips. But not just any kind. Only Chilli Heatwave Doritos will do. He has become a popular tourist attraction and customers have started paying for his chips.
Daily Mail
Pippa, a 17-year-old cockatoo, spent a fortnight trying to hatch some Cadbury Creme eggs at the Nuneaton Wildlife Sanctuary, where they said: ‘We’ll just leave her until she clicks they are not real. If you try to take one she goes crazy’.
Sunday Times / The Week
Robins have taken to singing at night because humans make too much noise in the daytime.
Guardian
Down Rover! British dog lovers are increasingly giving their pets human names. A survey revealed the top ten names as Ben, Sam, Max, Toby, Holly, Charlie, Lucy, Barney, Bonnie and Sophie.
Top cat names were: Charlie, Tigger, Oscar, Lucy, Soot, Thomas, Poppy, Sophie, Smudge and Molly.
The Times
John Wayne called his dog ‘Dog’.
The Times
A Labrador is far more English than the bulldog. It is more English than the crumpets he wolfs and the chintz sofas he hogs. A dog that an Englishman would rather pet than Kylie Minogue’s bottom.
Daily Telegraph
Tash, the pub cat at the Salerie Inn in St Peter Port, Guernsey, bears an unfortunate resemblance to Adolf Hitler. Tash has a striking Fuhrer-type black moustache which causes customers to advise: ‘Don’t mention the paw.’
Daily Mail
A Mayfield, East Sussex, woman bought a birdbath with coins worth
£
8.20 left on her garden bird table by a crow.
Birmingham Evening Mail
A woman who entered a photograph of her Burmese cat in a ‘beautiful pet’ competition in Bedford was told that she could not claim the prize she won because the cat had been dead for two years.
Bedfordshire on Sunday
RSPCA inspectors summoned to free an owl trapped in a church tower in Bath called off the rescue when they discovered it was stuffed. It was put there so that customers at a nearby binoculars shop could test their equipment.
Daily Telegraph
A survey of American tourists in Scotland revealed that one in four of them believed that haggis was an animal they could hunt.
Evening Standard
Scientists in Canada and Scotland report that schools of herring communicate by farting. Researchers suspect that herrings hear the bubbles as they are expelled and the noise helps them to form protective shoals at night.
National Geographic News
The way to find lasting love is to take your dog for a walk in the park. Warwick University scientists claim that people who do this are more likely to meet a future partner than anywhere else. Health psychologist June McNicholas said having a dog could increase the chance of getting ‘chatted up’ by up to 1,000 per cent.
Daily Telegraph
A Jack Russell terrier called Part-X is being trained by its owner to water-ski after learning how to ride a surfboard.
Sun
E
XCUSE
ME
, M
ISS
,
IS
THAT A
CHAMELEON ON YOUR HEAD
?
Daily Telegraph
headline on its story about a 17-year-old who tried to get through Customs at Manchester wearing the protected species as a hat.
Daily Telegraph
Cats have recently replaced dogs as the nation’s favourite pets and there are over seven million of them – mostly owned by women. Eighty per cent of subscribers to Cats Today magazine are women and editor Jill Reid is convinced that many men are cat lovers, but they would be embarrassed to be seen with a cat magazine. The
Guardian
reports that Jill’s own cat, Coco, prefers to snuggle on the chest of her boyfriend Tim and says: ‘Tim thinks the explanation is that men’s chests are more level’.
Guardian
Dogs top the list of animals used in advertising. Cats come next, although perceived by some as being selfish and cruel. Surprisingly pigs come third, despite ‘a reputation for less than pristine personal hygiene’. Researchers found that ‘Britons have an almost ludicrous affinity to pigs. If you go into almost any home in the country they are there – in figurines, pictures or just piggybanks’.
Daily Telegraph
A hamster was seen bowling along inside its toy exercise ball on the hard shoulder of the M6.
Independent on Sunday
Environmental health officers in Barbegh, Suffolk, received a complaint from a woman that a neighbour’s horse was urinating too loudly. The complaint was among the top ten of their most unusual calls.
Sunday Times
A lost pet tortoise was found safe and well on a motorway having crawled one-and-a-half miles in three weeks. Freddy, owned by Wendy Passell of Otterbourne, near Winchester, was seen plodding south on the M3 having managed an average speed of 0.0034mph. Proud Mrs Passell said: ‘People don’t realise how hyperactive Freddie is.’
Evening Standard
A survey in
Our Dogs
magazine found a bull terrier which swallowed a bottle cap, a toy car and some wire and some cling film. It was operated on, the objects were removed and the dog was put on a drip. It ate the drip.
Sunday Times
Legendary actress Sarah Bernhard had a pet alligator which died after she fed him too much champagne. And her boa constrictor died after swallowing a cushion.
Daily Mail
Bathers swam towards a huge basking shark (they can be around 40ft long and weigh up to seven tonnes) which appeared off Porthcurno beach in Cornwall.
Lifeguards were quickly on the scene – but they were there to protect the shark, not the bathers. Basking sharks are a protected species which feed on plankton and are regarded as harmless. ‘We try to keep people away from them’, said one of the guards.
The Times
A 1997 edition of
The Times
reported:
The royal pets include a number of ‘dorgis’ – crosses between the Queen’s corgis and Princess Margaret’s dachshunds.
Royal photographer Norman Parkinson was having lunch at the Palace one day and had the temerity to ask how the breeds could couple successfully, considering their different stature.
‘Oh,’ said the Queen, ‘it’s really very simple. We have a little brick.’
The Times
A Kennel Club official commented: ‘The dachshund was evolved to chase badgers down holes and corgis to round up cattle. If anyone loses a herd of cattle down a badger hole, dorgis are just the dogs to get them out.’
The Times
J. Mervyn Williams, of Huddersfield, remembers calling into a pub in Wales in the early 1960s when the locals were discussing how much it cost having sheep neutered by vets ‘since old Edwards died’. He asked them if he could make a good living if he set up doing the job old Edwards did.
They asked him: ‘Have you got your own teeth?’
Daily Mail
Dogs and pubs rival the weather as subjects of conversation among the English. The
Daily Telegraph
had a whole raft of letters on them:
- Children should be barred from pubs, but dogs are an essential accessory.
- Dogs are grotesquely over-privileged manure machines and should be kept out of pubs.
- Dogs are never the pub bore.
- Landlords who want to ban dogs should be banned from running pubs.
Daily Telegraph
Warwickshire Fire Brigade swung into action in response to a 999 call. It sent three fire engines (with five men to each engine) and two men with a rubber dinghy. They travelled 35 miles to a drainage tunnel at Earlswood Lakes, near Solihull – and rescued a trapped duck.
BBC News / Guardian
Sue Baines, of Quernmore, Lancashire, had a cat called Geoffrey which was known as Geoffrey Boycat.
Daily Telegraph
Under the headline W
HY
Y
OU
R
EALLY
C
AN’T
C
ALL
YOUR
C
AT
K
EITH
, Christopher Howse informs us of some oddball monikers humans have given to their cats.
Thomas Hardy had one called Kiddleywinkempoops, and many a poor cat is called Astrophe and Aclysm (or anything else that begins with ‘cat’).
Florence Nightingale had Bismarck and Disraeli.
Jock and Margate belonged to Winston Churchill.
Ernest Hemingway had Fats, Crazy Christian and Friendless Brother.
It is said that Thomas Hardy’s ashes were to be buried at Westminster Abbey and his heart in his Dorset village. The heart was left for a few minutes in the kitchen in a tea towel. His cat ate it. The tale is denied, but the story will not go away.
Daily Telegraph
Strange names for animals reminded Marjorie Stratton, of Chippenham, Wiltshire, of a chap who had a horse called Business. His wife was able to reply truthfully to demanding phones calls that her husband was away on Business when he was enjoying a day on his hunter.
Daily Telegraph
It’s not mice that elephants are afraid of… it’s bees. Despite their thick skins and size advantage, elephants turn tail and flee at the sound of a swarm of bees according to research in Kenya.
Guardian
A Huddersfield man has had to change his mobile phone ring tone five times because Billy, his blue-fronted Amazon parrot, learns to copy it. Billy waits until his owner is out of the room before pretending to be an incoming call – then laughs when he dashes in to answer it.
Daily Telegraph