The other morning (*cough* early afternoon) I awoke to find, upon lethargically teasing the curtains back to confront the horrible, horrible daylight, a back garden strewn with cascading feathers. Initially, I thought they might be fluffy blossom from the neighbours', erm, fluffy blossom tree (horticulture is not my specialist subject. I'm not even sure horticulture is the right word I'm looking for. That's how unspecialist a subject it is. Botony, perhaps. Plants and all that jazz.) but upon further, reluctant, inspection they were, indeed, bird debris.

My neighbourhood has a lot of cats. I don't like them, personally - too smug. Them, not me. Although they may have a similarly low opinion of my continued presence in their domain. Which, let's face it, any neighbourhood they inhabit is. Those hissing, furballian dickheads don't share. That's not how it works. Anyway, it would have been easy enough to dismiss the discovery of all manner of feathery carnage dancing across the lawn as the remnants of yet another alleged cat-based birdicide (my money would've been on Rosebud, the bastard Siamese from down the road. He always looks shifty. Like he's carrying a knife or something. He probably isn't - that's just my prejudice talking), but out of the corner of my eye I spotted a stunned or stoned pigeon waddling about by the bins in a daze, pissing feathers everywhere as he laughably did so. There's no way Rosebud would've left any witnesses. That's not his style. He'd have gone back for the family. It was then that I noticed a bloody, greasy smear down the lounge window. Taking off my Rolf Harris wobble board and putting on my Columbo thinking mackintosh, I deduced that there had been a violent coming together between those age old enemies: the pigeon and the double-glazing.

But I should've guessed that from the start as, weirdly, in the few years I've lived where I sort of live (does it count as living if you don't really take part except under extreme duress?) there have been multiple bird/house collisions, resulting in a number of fatalities and at least one assisted suicide.

The first I remember was, again, a pigeon, which announced itself in the early evening sunshine, sauntering up and down the patio with its head dragging on the ground; its obviously snapped neck lolloping from side to side like a string of overcooked spaghetti. He seemed happy enough with his day's work, but there was a feeling from within the household that it was more than a flesh wound and that the humane thing to do would be to bash his f*cking brains in with a rock. Although, as it turned out, no-one could find a big enough rock to get the job done properly, so we had to go at it with a claw hammer.

I don't know if you've ever seen a bird's head explode, but it's less cool than it sounds. Mildly harrowing, in fact.

Compassionately, we gave him a dignified send off by burying him in the patch of mud by the shed that the neighbourhood cats squabble over for shitting rights. Sleep well, brave prince. Until tomorrow when you get dug up and shat on or eaten or both.

The most amusing mismatch was when a tiny sparrow chick decided to take on the shimmery looking-wall with what can only be described as a high-speed, kamikaze head-butt on quite possibly his (or hers - they could all have been hers in this story. But I don't know how to sex birds. Or women.) maiden flight. He certainly seemed a little young to be flying. Maybe that's just my paternal instinct kicking in. The one I conveniently forget in the presence of claw hammers and stricken vertebrates. Blood lust wins out every time. I blame TV. I was sitting in the lounge at the time of the assault, no doubt being mentally conditioned by the aforementioned television into behavioural wrongness and insatiable consumerism, and literally saw the whole thing play out. The mini sparrow powered into the window with a cartoonish squeak and must've rebounded ten feet, as though trying to pass himself off as a tennis ball. With a beak. Someone should patent that idea, by the way. Balls with beaks. BeakBalls. It's selling itself.

Oddly, he was fine. He just sort of lay there on his back, shaking his head, probably admonishing himself for his clumsiness and the ensuing social embarrassment. He might have been wondering if there was any way of incorporating a face-flattening air disaster into his natural stride in order to make it seem to onlookers as if he meant to do it all along - that's just how he rolls. I do that whenever I stumble in the street. A few further steps down the line, I throw in a less exaggerated stumble - a skip, almost - as though I'm just a spring-heeled, random kind of chap. I don't know why I think it rescues my cool points with anyone who might happen to be watching me (or why they'd be watching me for so long). It probably looks like I have some kind of palsy. I once tried to impress a girl by merely throwing a casual hop into what would have been a simple, run-of-the-mill step up the kerb and onto the pavement, increasing the difficulty of the basic manoeuvre by a barely perceptible fraction of a fraction. But that was all it took to tip me over the edge. In the act of hopping, the laces on one of my boots somehow became entangled in the hooky eyelets (not a technical term) on the other boot, fusing my feet together in mid air, sending me into a mini-sparrow-esque nose-dive into my gravelly, abrasive nemesis' cold embrace.

Flat on my face, the immediate thought running through my (as demonstrated) malfunctioning brain was whether there was any possible way I could make this work for me - perhaps judo-roll out of it; make it appear an act of acrobatic performance theatre, a throwback to the days of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. Could I get away with that? I was pretty sure I was bleeding profusely from the elbow. How would I explain that? And what the f*ck was I doing anyway? Hopping up the f*cking kerb? What was I expecting to happen? Would the onlooking girl of my recent, fickle fancy do a sudden double-take and be all, like, "Wow! Hold the phone! I never noticed that hideous shitcake before. But now I've seen than he hops up kerbs, I can't imagine my life without him in it. And also I'll do his washing and service his weird sexual peccadilloes. Which will result in more washing. But I'll do it..."? Having dismissed the notion that I could in any way get away with my collapse (although brief consideration was given to turning it into a piece of impromptu break-dance, but I felt a public airing of my worm might be an embarrassment too far at that juncture), and fearing that the absolute nightmare scenario of my imaginary paramour thinking I was badly injured (aside from my obliterated pride) and helping my shamed, pathetic, stricken vessel back onto its moorings (if that's a thing - boats and horticulture. And women. Also kerbs.) and inevitably having to engage with me over what had just transpired - I wasn't ready for that conversation; I may never be - I quickly untangled my boots, dragged my sorry carcass off the ground and double-timed it away from the scene. Did I throw in a less exaggerated hop as I made my exit? Or course I f*cking did. What a prick.

A couple of weeks later, I read in the local paper that the object of my affliction (I think that's the saying) was engaged to be married to someone who can probably walk up kerbs in his sleep. I sometimes wonder if I drove her to it. Things could've been so different. Or exactly the same but with one less incident of public humiliation and minor blood loss.

Anyway, the fun-sized sparrow got his fun-sized senses together after about twenty minutes of perplexed grumbling, and flew away to live a happy, fulfilling life of whatever birds are into. Making nests and shitting on cars. I mean, he might have flown away to that. Or one of the cats got him. It wasn't like I was going to spend twenty minutes staring at a befuddled sparrow while I was watching television. All I know is, he was there, then he wasn't. I've opted for the happy ending. Others may go darker. That's their prerogative.

As for the pigeon who bird-bombed the lounge window the other day, he quickly got over himself and remembered he could fly when I confronted him. I wasn't even carrying the hammer. Perhaps word had got around. He dusted himself off and took to the skies in a whirl of feathers and busted bits, heroically limping to safety... and crashing straight into my bedroom window, bouncing off the garage roof and over the fence into next door's garden.

They've got two cats.