I share my views about golf and do some veterinary work

The French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist to whom I am married and I are looking at the telly.   There is an ad on featuring some men with decisive side partings high-fiving each other on a golf course.  They are selling a bank.

Me: If you ever take up golf, I will leave you.
Pathologist: No need. I would leave myself.

Earlier that day, the cat - one of two, gigantically stupid and called Corndog - catches a bird. As she has the gait of a three-legged morbidly obese rhinoceros, it is a miracle that she has caught anything, let alone a bird.

Me: Is it dead?
Pathologist: Probably.

Time passes.  A dog barks distantly on the horizon.  A twat on a Harley goes past, and a gigantic cry goes up from next door, where our neighbours (nudist gardeners and growers of speciality vegetables) appear to be having a party involving touch-football and sausages in buns.

Pathologist: Can you help me?
Me: What with?
Pathologist: The bird.

I pry my crazed eyes away from "Real Housewives of Jersey Shore" and turn to find the pathologist two feet away from me, holding a tiny blackbird who is clearly not at all dead.  "Getthatbirdawayfromme." "Don't be stupid. It can't hurt you." The bird blinks.

"It has a little hole in its face but otherwise is fine, so I am going to give him some antibiotics to give him a fighting chance."   He goes upstairs, still holding the blackbird (who is not exactly smoking a pipe by the fire, but is not over-excited either), and comes back down with some drops.  We go over to the window; the pathologist opens the bird's beak; I put in three drops.

Me: How do you know how to get a bird to open its beak?
Pathologist: I spent a long time at the raptor clinic.

I dare not ask what a 'raptor clinic' is, and I learnt a long time ago not to ask why it is that we have things like bird-ready antibiotic drops in the house.  Instead, I watch the pathologist take it outside, listen for the sound of frantic squawking, hold it up in the direction of the racket and say, "here you are mother blackbird, here is your baby".  The squawking stops. The pathologist puts the baby bird on the fence, and wanders off.

It disappears very quickly, so quickly in fact that we think it has fallen off the other side and into a clump of weeds. But no, it has not fallen off the fence; it is in fact returned to the hedge at the back of our house preparing to either: a) follow the pathologist around the garden in the manner of the blue birds in Snow White for evermore; or b) like its mother and extended family, sit in the hedge outside our bedroom window and squawk like a bastard at 5am until I am forced to get out of bed and throw books at it.

I fear that it will chose the second option, and that I will regret ever giving it drops.

*Update*: Photographic evidence of a) tiny blackbird being held by pathologist (NB bandaged finger); and b) immensely fat cat who, by the looks of things, should only be able to catch slugs and/or blancmanges.

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