Life - you'll never get out of it alive

Here's a view of the gorgeous gum trees on the grounds at Uni. Oh all right, so I had to literally hang over our outside balcony area to avoid getting the Seventies' style arse-ugly buildings in the frame but you can imagine the happy tweetings of the birds who like to live and gather there to twitter on about their exciting day spent mostly crapping on the bonnets of Uni staff members' cars.

My work mate, aka 'Auntie Jude' for the sake of artistic licence, installed a lovely pottery birdbath just outside hers and my office windows and we've enjoyed seeing minah birds, willie wagtails, magpies and the occasional brave pigeon venture into the water. Patronage had increased significantly over the summer due to our drought which doesn't show any sign of ending. (Our garden is now a bowl of dust punctuated by a few dried up dollops of doggie doo-doos to add that extra visual feature we so desperately need).

Sadly, one day we arrived to this poor bird, in rigor-mortis only one metre away from the lusciously liquid tweety playground. There were no signs of cat, fox or even angry koala scuffles - not even a feather was out of place.

It seemed like such an anonymous and insulting way to die - left rigid on the green-painted asphalt in a university campus in line with the forgotton wheelie bin and ancient ash tray being ignored by all and sundry.

I sighed deeply, dramatically and, well - to no reaction at all because I was the first one in that morning. Looking under the rabble of paper cups, extension cords and gluten-free biscuits that is currently functioning as our kitchen cupboard, a couple of plastic shopping bags were found.

Birdy was subjected to even more humiliation - he was treated exactly like a dog turd. Yes - I covered my right hand with one bag as a glove, lifted him in, reversed the bag and tied it up into a knot.

Only a vague stain showed where he had finally gasped his last breath, which added to his shameful demise because it made me wrap him in another bag to make sure the pong fumes were going to be sealed in for the hundred years or so it would take for the evil, ecologically-unsound petrochemical-soaked bag to break down and decompose, releasing its toxins into the earth and then no doubt killing off a rare andeluvian earth worm or something....

Then it was 'Bye Bye Birdie' as he was ever so casually flung into the bin and almost immediately forgotten. That is, until I snuck upstairs to get the camera.... Believe it or not these special snaps weren't selected for our team's annual report, miserable gits!

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