The English countryside is no more. Since it became a single vast coach-blocked conurbation of ring roads and ‘Village-Experience’-style housing interspersed with poisonous cows, satanic farms breeding mutant chickens and genetically tampered-with crops, somewhere to empty the car ashtrays and shop for discount computer software, you have a better chance of spotting wildlife in its natural habitat where it belongs, wandering the streets of inner cities. Here’s a breakdown of some of the horrifying creatures currently stalking the night streets of the city.
The city pigeon, or Flying Rat, builds its nests in the lighting above strip-clubs and massage parlours. Its bodily secretions are powerful enough to short out up to twenty metres of neon tubing in one sitting. Pigeons are the billy goats of the sky, eating over seventy times their own weight each day. Sardine tins, syringes, used prophylactics, pizza cardboard, they all spell dinner to Stumpy, the peckish smoke-owl. For this reason, city birds do not make good eating, and when dead should be poked down a drain with a stick rather than served on a pesto mash with raspberry coulis. Pigeons are only spotted on pavements when they are very ill, or when they have had their feet burned off by pungent chemicals left on the ledges of government buildings.
The best places to pigeon-spot are in tree-lined squares, where, attracted by the smell of chips and Tennants Super Lager, they can be seen dropping from low branches to carry off pension books and under-nourished children, or arguing treasure-trove rights with tramps over urine-soaked cheese rolls. At airports you can watch entire flocks getting sucked into the jet engines of 747s.
These lively, independent creatures are distinguished by their unusual markings – clumped hair, torn-off ears, leg-stumps and missing eyes. They have been known to fly onto the face of a home-going clubber from a distance of forty metres, and can eat an entire pensioner in under two hours. The best time to hear them is after 2:00am, when fighting pairs sound like siamese twins in a spin-dryer. Feral cats can be spotted vomiting fishbones outside takeaway food outlets, where they are often befriended by half-asleep crack addicts. Their high, hacking coughs are possibly a mating call, or an attempt to clear their windpipes of cigarette-packet cellophane. Beware of feral cats rooting about outside the exit doors of one-nighters, as these are often hyperactive and hallucinating, and will not slow down until they have eaten a Marks & Spencers spaghetti and listened to at least four hours of low-level trancey mixes.
Many of the city’s top takeaway managers breed exotic insects as a hobby. Drawn by the pheremones inherent in rancid fat, these creatures are allergic to bright light, and you will find them dragging themselves across the floors of takeaways underneath polystyrene box lids. Some species stem from Agent Orange experiments conducted in the underground tunnels beneath Saigon, and are sexually attracted to the smell of disinfectant blocks in restaurant toilets. Others live in temperatures higher than a human being can stand, and can be found performing water-ballets in the boiling oil of hot-dog stands.
Occasionally you may be lucky enough to spot rare Stickle-backed Vegetable-Bin Beetles on their nightly forage. One of these shy, colourful invertebrates can carry a family-sized sliced loaf on its back, and will explode if you stamp on him. The Razorbacked Vindaloo Dung Bug will noisily drink gravy from an unguarded plate, and has been known to lift a diner’s chair in its mandibles, while the Chip-Batter Mildew Mite can pass its entire life-cycle beneath the surface of a pickled onion. Other, more specialised bugs breed in frozen pink slabs of burger meat as they are defrosted on griddles outside nightclubs, and devour all forms of garnish, puking it back into the bun for their children just before you put it in your mouth.
You may not notice these shy brown-furred rodents until the alerting rumble of an approaching tube train sends them scurrying for cover in their thousands. One often sees a homebound office worker, slightly the worse for alcohol, staring vacantly at the rails, only to suddenly start in terror as a Pied-Piperish squeaking carpet cascades over his feet. Tube mice are harmless, and only harbour old-fashioned diseases like Bubonic Plague and Dropsy. They can cause commuters to catch a weird kind of herpes from rubber escalator handrails, and work in teams to replace the chocolate bars in platform vending machines with silver-foil-wrapped assortments of droppings. A variant breed is the luminous orange tube-mouse, which gains its pigmentation from drinking the dregs from discarded bottles of Sunny Delight. The friendly cousins of …
You used to know where you were with a rat (or not – see here). They came available in two varieties, black and brown, were responsible for thousands of plague deaths and attacked the baby in Lady and the Tramp. Kids thought they could sort of fly through the air onto your face and gnaw your eyes out in seconds, whereas they mostly just cowered or ran away squeaking. However, having grown fit on a diet of kebab droppings and half-digested McDonalds burgers vomited onto pavements after the pubs shut, they now have all the top jobs writing feature articles about ‘How Staying in is the New Going Out’ in ‘style’ magazines like Dazed & Confused, and fill pages with blurred pictures of bony girls who appear to have been dressed during bombing raids, train crashes and bad recreations of sixties’ happenings.
These adaptable mammals are nocturnal, and their eerie moans recall the sound of Victorian babies with whooping cough. You may see signs that they have visited your bin-liners in the night. Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes will not only have been cleared of bones; some foxes have learned how to open and use the moist towelette. The nesting fox’s greatest enemy is the Falling-Over-Tramp, who frequently topples onto their young, mistaking them for cushions. Foxes drink from doorstep milk bottles, and have been known to change overnight orders for low fat yogurt to full cream.
Most people know that the grey squirrel wiped out the red squirrel population of Great Britain, but did you know that many London squirrels can also pick your pocket and forge your cheque-card signature? Some hang around the entrances to parks making sexist remarks about passing girls and throwing nuts at old people. Teams of Gangsta Squirrels, or Squizzas, were behind the Great Hyde Park Conker Scam of 1998, and this year the ones in Regent’s Park operated as ticket touts outside the open-air theatre, resulting in scenes of mob violence during performances of The Pirates Of Penzance.
These animals bear no resemblance to the beasts you see on wildlife programmes posing majestically on African plains. Most of them have lost the will to live, and loiter at the rear of their cages smoking high-tar cigarettes, listening to hip-hop bands or copulating with their food containers. Cages turn larger animals psychotic, and if you approach them incautiously they will try to force Unitarian Church leaflets and lucky heather onto you. Some smaller animals grow insignificant in zoos, blending so well with their surroundings that you cannot tell whether you are looking at a frog-eating lizard or some pebbles and a stick. Present-day ideology prevents zoo monkeys from being allowed to conduct tea parties. Instead they excite schoolchildren by sticking their fingers up their bottoms and morosely sniffing them.
During Easter, the windows of city florists fill with dazzling flowers that drop dead minutes after the Ascension. In the city’s springtime, residents chain daffodils to their windowsills and trees leak Alien-acid-sap onto car bonnets. Some flowers are actually kept fresh by the chemicals found in car exhaust fumes, while others maintain their upright position in restaurant vases by the insertion of wires. Roses can be spotted on the roof racks of hearses stuck in traffic jams. Daffodils sprout in the wall-cracks of nightclub cloakrooms. Natural city greenery dangles from pub walls, courtesy of automatic watering systems. Some species of urban flora has adapted to carnivorous status, and can eat flies, bluebottles, nuts and the hard urine-stained peppermints people take from bowls in burger cafés after going to the toilet.
Although vegetables may be grown in the city, most urbanites believe that tinned food is the only food you can trust because it is sealed, whereas organic produce grows in dirt and is therefore harmful to anyone who still points from a car window when they see a cow.
Sixteen was traditionally a special age, the time of sexual flowering and personal growth. Now it is usually marked by a first conviction for aggravated assault. By the age of sixteen, gang members have reproduced often enough to become bored with the idea, and have moved on to the taking of life. Marked by their matching plumage of sportswear and baseball caps under grey cotton hoods, like large drab ducks, they huddle smoking in bus shelters, waiting for windfalls near senior citizens’ hostels on pension day, noisily scoffing from plastic McDonalds boxes, the lids of which are good for holding used syringes. Their colourful cries increase as the pubs close and they set off clutching cans of Stella, hoping to kick someone to death for looking at them the wrong way. Few of these rituals are ever observed, as the city’s million-pound CCTV systems are simply defeated by the use of a cheap hat.
These nocturnal creatures leave their spoor in various parts of North London, especially in the section christened ‘Murder Mile’, from outside Camden Town’s Prêt à Manger (trainee rabbi found hacked up in bin-bags), past Royal College Street (whores chopped into pieces and dumped in bin-bags, identified by their breast implants), along Kentish Town Road (where Adam Ant threw a carburettor through a pub window and threatened patrons with a fake gun), to Kentish Town tube (man beaten to death for asking the way) and Tufnell Park tube station (half a dozen assorted lethal gunshot victims). Also near this site is the spot where Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, allegedly pushed someone down a flight of steps at a party. And so the city’s Hogarthian spirit lives on.
Bin-Bag Murderers are the latest incarnation of London’s human ferality. While they are responsible for cruelly taking human life, BBMs are, however, civic-minded enough not to just shovel guts and limbs into gutters, leaving them where the rats, mice, insects, cats, squirrels and foxes can gorge on them, causing them to genetically mutate into something entirely nastier, and they do have the appealing side-effect of ensuring that the dustmen always turn up on time in hopes of recovering the victims’ jewellery.
If you spot any creatures that do not conform to any of the categories mentioned in this guide, they might belong to another species entirely, like homegoing clubbers or Golf Sale placard holders, and it is best not to stroke them. And if you do go to the countryside, remember that nothing on four legs can really harm you there – the most ferocious creature of all will always be man.