Groanin' Jock

I don't mean psychopaths or really dangerous people, although I did meet one or two of them as well, but just unusual folks with their own strange way of going about their business in the world at large.

One of the most memorable was a middle-aged man who appeared in the office in which I worked almost as soon as we opened the doors one morning.

He told me that he had a story, but I'd have to come outside to find out more.

So, heading out into the rain, I followed the strange man. (My Mither always told me that I shouldn't do that, but I was curious. I should have followed her advice).

We crossed the road and arrived at his large estate car, parked in a busy shopping street.

The man unlocked the doors and told me to sit in the passenger seat.

Taking further leave of my already distant senses I followed his instructions. As I eased my way into the vehicle, my nose was met by a pungent stench.

Having grown up in the countryside, I'm used to the smells associated with animals. Faither, a gamekeeper when I was a boy, kept dogs and ferrets, and we also had chickens, ducks and guinea fowl over the years.

Sitting in that car, the smell reminded of that you would get from a ferret's cage, the musky odour of rodents that don't care too much about their bathing habits.

The strange man, sitting in the driver's seat, began to tell me his story. He liked to watch swans. He liked to feed swans. But, for the most part, he felt that wild swans should be left to get on with their affairs untroubled by the machinations of mankind.

He was most upset that, the night before, when he had ventured along the Crinan Canal to watch the swans bobbing on the water, he had encountered a dead swan lying on the towpath.

It was at this point in his tale that the strange gentleman removed a black binliner from the back of the car, revealing the stinking corpse of a two-day dead swan.

Those of you familiar with this far-flung outpost of the worldwide interweb will be aware that I have a phobia of birds. Admittedly, this swan was dead, but it was still only a few inches from me.

Nonetheless, I managed to maintain my composed demeanour, and asked the strange man why he thought I should know about a dead swan. As I succinctly put it, animals die every day, and those passings generally don't make the pages of the press. (Which headline sounds least exciting - "Dog bites man" or "Swan dies"?)

The strange man said that he believed that this swan, if not callously murdered, had been unintentionally killed by someone who had moved it from the open sea to the Crinan Canal. He explained his theory that, as swans need a good 20 metres in which to land when they've been flying, this unfortunate swan had become entangled in overhead power lines and had met its sorry fate.

It was the strange man's belief that this swan didn't normally spend its days on the canal, but had been transported there by someone who thought it would make a nice addition to the view from their sitting room window.

I gently explained that, without proof, there was little I could do - the local press isn't in the business of slandering suspected swan slayers. The strange man continued, stating that a dead swan was newsworthy regardless of the circumstances of its demise.

After much to-ing and fro-ing as we debated the media ethics behind the story, I finally relented. Keen to be free from the man's pungent swan hearse, I agreed that we should get a photograph of the swan. The strange man then drove us (myself and my ex-swan travelling companion) up to the bank of the canal, where he happily posed for photographs holding the lifeless bird's neck up so that its beak faced the lens.

Satisfied that he had done his bit for swankind, the man left, taking the body with him. We did eventually decide to run the story, primarily because we feared that if we didn't, the strange man might return with further dead animals.

There are very few aspects of my work with the local press that I miss - the hours were long, free time was scarce and the money very poor. But occasionally, I think of the strange people I encountered and wish that, just once, someone would turn up in the oil industry carrying the carcass of a dead bird. You know, just to liven things up a bit.