Tuesday 9 March 2010

Going, Going, Gone Barmy

I've been drafted into a quiz team tonight. Well, it's not exactly a team as such, there being just two of us. However, we shall gallantly challenge significantly more populated outfits consisting of squash-quaffing suburban librarians, teachers, legal secs and bank clerks ... and their iPhones. Our mission, as I understand it, is to drink plenty of beer and not finish last.

In the meantime, you might be interested in this catalyst for an involuntary collision of head and desk, flagged up today by Alex Deane of Big Brother Watch.

Jim Railton is an auctioneer. He was given a lot to sell - a little wooden cabinet with some 19th century eggs in it. It was valued at £30. He put it up for sale.

He was arrested and treated like a criminal - he is now charged with two offences relating to the sale of bird eggs under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 (an Act some 90 years younger than the eggs...). As Jim says,

"in retrospect, we should have just smashed the eggs. They are antique birds eggs, and all of common species, and had old paper copperplate hand-written labels on them. It was a little oak chest, which we judged to be circa 1900.

We sell butterflies, shells, taxidermy – in fact just the type of things that come from people’s attics. To be arrested for offering to sell this little chest seems absurd, and a complete waste of police time. They have interviewed me twice, taken my fingerprints, swabbed me for DNA, had RSPB specialist inspectors visit Berwick to look at the eggs..."
Two questions immediately spring to mind.

a) Which birds, exactly, are being protected here by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds?

b) How does one go about building a time machine to carry us back to the days just prior to the brutal murder of police common sense?


7 comments:

BTS said...

I've already told you how to build a time machine.

Or at least I will.

In about 3 weeks ago.

Although why I'm even bothering to tell you this now is beyond me.

Must be some sort of anomoly..

w/v: cotho - again..

watching said...

I used to have the utmost respect for the RSPB and the RSPCA but sadly they have taken the Labour dollar and of course the spiders web of strings that each dollar is attached to so that respect has long gone.

But stories like this in the MSM are just simple obfuscation to hide things like this

http://aljahom.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/nonsense-vacuity-ephemera-distractions-windmills-and-straw-men/

Anonymous said...

Dear Mr Puddlecote

The main occupation of the police today seems to be DNA harvester.

The reasons are immaterial, the logic irrelevant: get the b******s on the database - all of them.

This includes you. All of you.

Why do we pay taxes?

DP

John Pickworth said...

If Hitler had had the RSPCA instead of those light-weights the Gestapo, we'd all be speaking German now.

banned said...

Haven't the police got better things to do like arresting proper criminals, burglars rapists murderers and thieves? Oh, sorry, someone else already said that.

BTS said...

By the by, I've just popped back to ensure that the OED adopts my spelling of 'anomoly' as opposed to the one which you would all have otherwise considered to be correct..

w/v: comed - last time I abducted a teenage virgin.

All over the poor girl.

But she loved it.

Honestly.

She did.

Those charges are totally trumped up..

RSPBmarkII said...

Born Free Foundation make an "innocent" enquiry to local Councils regarding their implemenation of the Zoo Licensing Act. http://www.bornfree.org.uk/news/news-article/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=459
A charity funded local bird sanctuary raises a small amount of revenue showing people around their facilities and the birds that are being rehabilitated to be released when well and those birds that will not be well enough to be released. Local Council decides that the Sanctuary falls under said Act. Bird Sanctuary closes. http://www.threeowls.co.uk/
Well done Born Free Foundation..... going, going, gone Barmy.