While spending a good portion of his weekly income on the Euromillions, Mr. Garry Lee Shaw complained about the fifth or even sixth time that week that he’d seen the exact same pigeon outside his flat window while he Hoovered naked.
Explaining that he likes to “give it a good dust”, and get “right down deep in there”, Mr. Shaw had first noticed the pigeon the previous month while clearing old TV guides out of a hollow footstool with a flip-top lid. At the time he thought nothing of it.
It wasn’t until the following week while he was sucking the hard to reach bits of fluff from between the keys of a four and a half octave Casio keyboard that he realized that something was wrong.
Deeply wrong.
“Every time I was Hoovering, it was there. In the same place. Watching me. Naked. I didn’t know what to do. I mean, I’m on the second floor and it’s a lovely view out over Halifax Road and no one else can see in cause I’m higher up so I couldn’t close the curtain. If someone could see me, I’d just close it, right away. But they can’t.”
Mr. Shaw continued to recount additional intrusions by the pigeon, including a particularly traumatic one when he’d retired to the sanctuary of his bathroom and was Hoovering the hand towel, only to hear a malevolent flutter outside the bathroom window itself.
“Is nowhere safe?” He questioned.
Still, the purchase of the Euromillions ticket provided Mr. Shaw with renewed hope that he could finally break free from the crushing poverty that compelled him to live in such terrible conditions, held captive by voyeuristic birds.
“If I do it, finally do it,” he stated, clutching his lines, “I’m gonna get away from this, all of it.” He then reassured the newsagent, Mr. Tufail, that he’d sort him out with a little something first, cause “You’re alright, you.”
