This kind of florid language can only mean that I'm watching far too much "NYPD: Blue" and have started channelling Andy Sipowicz in my everyday thought processes, but I now have much reason to fear the repercussions of Karma given that, on my way to work last Friday morning, I flattened a pigeon with the offside tyre of my car on my way to work.
At least, if the slight bump I felt and the cloud of feathers I spotted in my rear view mirror afterwards is anything to go by, then I must have flattened it, especially as it flew right under my wheels and was gone before I could do anything about it.
This is, of course, a rare thing. I do not go around deliberately trying to flatten random birdlife with my car as I make my daily commute. In fact I am, in a small way, quite the bird-watcher and would never willingly harm any of our feathered friends, so this has left me feeling more than a little upset, if I'm being perfectly honest with you.
The only other memory I have of inadvertently creating some roadkill was when a rabbit leapt out onto the A40 early one morning when I was heading home after completing one of my years at college in South Wales. After I hit it, and I watched it roll over a few times on the road behind me, I switched off the radio in my Cortina and had an hour's respectful silence in its memory as I headed towards home.
Of course, there are those who will tell you that it's simply not possible to hit a pigeon, that they always somehow manage to fly away without being harmed no matter how close to them you think you might get as they sit in the roadway pecking away at whatever food it is that they find there.
Well, I have to tell you that those people are wrong.
Dead wrong.
And, to be honest, I'm feeling more than a little bit bothered that a poor, innocent pigeon which started out on this foggy spring morning with few plans other than to feed itself, instead ended up flattened on a roadside somewhere between my home and my office with no future at all to look forward to.
Meanwhile, I can't help but hope that, despite my general scepticism about the possibility of such things, it wasn't the reincarnation of somebody dear to me, although, given it's general lack of nimbleness and fundamental basic ignorance of the laws of physics, momentum and mechanical engineering, I can't really think of quite who it could once have been.
I certainly can't imagine that we'd have had a lot too say to each other.
And so, now I can do little other than wait for Karma to exact its inevitable revenge, or for the next incarnation which that particular soul inhabits to make itself known to me. Maybe the life essence housed within that particular pigeon was once a Welsh rabbit, and maybe it spent some time inhabiting that spider I inadvertently drowned in the sink last year, and then leapt into the body of that annoyingly buzzy fly which I accidentally squashed when I was trying to catch it inside a handy vessel and take it outside.
You see, I do my very level best to do as little harm as possible to the creatures which surround us in this small oasis of life as it hurtles through a bleak, cold and empty universe, but sometimes these things just happen, and, if I do turn out to be a "repeat offender" towards snuffing out that particular soul, then I'll probably do it again sometime without even knowing it, building up levels of rage and thoughts of vengeance within it, no matter what creature it finds itself inhabiting next.
Meanwhile, I just have to await whatever it is that Karma has in store for me, and avoid going anywhere which has venomous snakes as part of its local wildlife.
Just in case.
Sorry, pigeon. I know that it's absolutely no consolation, but I really, really didn't do it deliberately…
I barely missed a deer once on the A55. It sprang from the central barrier, over my bonnet, and into the path of the car next to me. I heard the thud and watched it as it hit the hard shoulder. Horrible.
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