Birds and bus delinquents

Evidence that spring is here: I came home tonight to a house full of feathers.  So many feathers that I was sure Parsnips must have caught a blackbird, or possibly an albatross.  But when I followed the trail of feathers in and out of several rooms, and finally found the victim under my desk, it turned out to be a very young (and very dead) sparrow.  The poor thing can’t have been much beyond its first flight (which probably explains how Parsnips managed to catch it – she’s not the most able hunter, so it was probably more a case of the bird accidentally stumbling into her jaws, rather than any determined act of hunting on her part).


In the “another reason to lose faith in humanity” category, a month or so ago I was catching the bus home very late one night when I encountered two very drunk very young teenage girls (like only barely in their teens young).  They were happy drunk rather than aggressive drunk, and started chatting to me about what a fun night they’d been having.  They said they lived in Avonside (which is way over the other side of town), and were plotting how to sneak onto the bus without paying, because they’d lost their bus cards (in some long and complicated story), and had spent all their cash.
Of course, “I’ve lost my bus card” is a well-known scam for getting money out of gullible people, and normally I would have just said I couldn’t help and left them at the bus stop.  But, as I said, it was late at night, and they were drunk, and young, and I kept thinking about all the things that can happen to drunk and vulnerable young girls at poorly-lit bus stops late at night, so I decided the cost of a couple of bus fares was worth it to not spend the rest of the night wondering if they were ok, so when the bus arrived I told them I’d pay their fares, as long as they promised they would go straight home.  They were surprised and grateful (in a way that made me think they really had just been telling me the story as a cool story, not because they were begging), and (after a bit of negotiation with the bus driver, who was understandably concerned that they might be sick on the bus), we all got on the bus.  When I got off at my stop, I asked the (female) bus driver to keep an eye on them and make sure they got off in Avonside, and all seemed good.
Except, last Sunday night I caught the same bus, and the driver recognised me, and told me the story of what happened after I got off.  Apparently they got as far as Shirley (about another half an hour on from my stop) before robbing one of the other passengers and assaulting the bus driver when she tried to intervene.  She’d had to call the police to get them removed from the bus 🙁  I was horrified, and apologised to her for having inflicted the girls on her, but she said she didn’t blame me at all, because I was just trying to do the right thing and wasn’t to know.  The really sad thing was that she said it didn’t even surprise her, after everything she’d seen driving the bus at night.
So yeah, so much for my good deed – all it did was ruin the poor bus driver’s night.

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One Comment

  1. Well, you acted on the lights that you were given at the time.
    That’s what’s so sad about lies. They contaminate everything.
    YOURS was the only deed done in goodness. Take comfort in that…

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