The doorbell rang yesterday. Usually when that happens it's a visitor for the downstairs crowd who hasn't realised that two doorbell buttons means you have to choose the right one. Occaisionally I get someone at the door asking wierd questions and I'll have to put that down to mistaken identity. Sometimes there's no-one there at all.

Having disentangled myself from the headphones, picked myself back off the floor having tripped on he cables, and repositioning te objects I knocked over, not to mention a perilous descent down the steep and treachorous stairs, I opened the door and.... No-one.

Brilliant. Well I'll have a look outside to see if anyone gave up waiting for me to extract myself from my home. As it happens, I didn't need to. An energetic young blonde lady leapt into view and breathlessly apologised for not realising I was actually going to open the door.

Normally I dismiss charity salespersons but in this case, seeing as she was so pretty and apologetic, I'll listen. To be honest, she hardly got a word in edgeways. Once someone starts trying to tell me about how the planet is going to the dogs I start on my sermon pointing out that things aren't necessarily the way the climate change brigade like to imagine them, rather like I did in the previous blog entry. (Sorry Your Highness, but you really have been listening to a lot of twaddle) It didn't matter because she wasn't going to get any money out of me anyway. So I apologised and promised to give her a plug.

That didn't come out the way I intended.

New Home For Nessie?

Lake Windemere in the north of England is now being searched for a mysterious monster said to be making appearances. It now exceeds the number of Loch Ness sightings. My guess is that Nessie has had kids and they've found themselves a rented lake south of the border. Nice area, plenty of room, only 13,000 years old. Soon to have posters of Che Guevara and traffic cones decorating the depths, not to mention lots of visitors with sonar and underwater cameras.

You know, maybe we should just let Nessie alone. I mean she's been swimming around our lakes for millenia now and doesn't harm anyone (except possibly once, during the Iron Age, when a raft was reportedly attacked by a sea serpent, but hey, we all lose our temper sometimes, huh?). Would you like the natural history paparazzi dogging your every move? Or Bill Oddie camped out by the edge of your lake? Or David Attenborough popping in for tea and biscuits?

Sooner or later, if the Nessie's are really there, there'll be a newspaper report with a smiling fisherman proudly displaying his mammoth prize catch of the day. That's the trouble with human beings. We like hunting, fishing, trapping, and selling our prey so that we can put our feet up in comfort.

The Promised Plug

Ladies and Gentleman, pease spare a thought for animals, because we've been a bit selfish towards them. Support the World Wildlife fund and make an animal happy.

World Wildlife Fund