It’s a story I’ve told often enough… To my children… Other people’s
children… Perhaps, one day, to my grandchildren…
About how the aliens came and invaded Earth and how we very nearly
were all goners…
Seeing as I’ve nothing better to do at the moment, I’ll tell it one more
time… (The name’s Starky, by the way…)
It was the year 2040, and mankind was feeling very smug and pleased
with itself after all the technological advances and scientific discoveries it
had made…
Then the aliens came.
And we realised that, after all, we still had a lot to learn… In fact, it was
very much because we still had a lot to learn that the invasion went ahead
in the first place…
These aliens had large, brilliantly constructed spaceships with top-of-the
line weaponry, speed, and aesthetics. Aesthetics meant a lot to these
blighters, so it turned out… Art, culture, even fashion – holy things to
these aliens! All we cared about at first was their superior firepower. We
were outclassed, outmatched, outdone!
The aliens could speak to us. Not with their physical mouths (they in fact
possessed nothing resembling a “mouth”) but by using a special machine
they carried about. A sort of translator. Don’t ask me how it worked- none
of us knew or cared. What we cared about was what they said through
these devices. That we were weak, pitiful, insignificant… Stupid, even! That
puny races such as ours would have to submit to theirs- that we would be
controlled and, pending further decision, perhaps even eliminated- by
them. (This was after they’d descended in their fancy spacecraft from the
heavens and rapidly subdued our puny military.)
We groaned, gnashed our teeth, and awaited our doom… In the meantime,
the aliens started making themselves at home. Bringing some of their
“furniture” from their home and dumping it on ours. They loved setting up
their works of art in particular, in outdoor locations in our cities and large
towns. Complex, bewildering paintings which defied the eye in its attempt
to find meaning… They were very colourful, I guess… And out of their
spaceships came smaller craft which they used to get about in general.
Flying cars, you could say… Zipping about, pulling down our homes and
erecting their stupid art… And they were always cleaning them, with this
weird orange gunk that smelled just awful but brought their bodywork up
all shiny and gleaming…
It was awful… Until, one day, they started packing up and heading for
home. Before the last spaceship left, one of their leaders told us why…
Because of the pigeon poo, they said… It was covering their spacecraft
and transport vessels. Destroying their priceless works of outdoor art… It
went hard and stuck to their stuff, and even with all their superior
knowledge and technology, they had a devil of a job trying to get it all
off… So they were quitting. And with that, they took off and quit. Hooray!
Naturally, we didn’t let the service the pigeons had unknowingly rendered
us go without some sort of recognition… So we erected loads of statues of
their kind in our cities and prominent locations all over the world.
And now, we have statues of pigeons all covered in pigeon poo!
Fancy that!

Daniel Macintyre 06/07/2025
(Copyright Daniel Macintyre 06/07/2025 protectmywork.com)