The Pigeon With a Season Ticket

Ashcombe Halt has two platforms, one bench and a pigeon with a routine. Every weekday he waits at the far end of platform two, boards the 7:14 through whichever door opens nearest, rides exactly one stop to Netherby and steps off. He then walks home along the footpath beside the line, arriving back at Ashcombe about forty minutes later. He has been doing this, as far as anyone can establish, for six years. He does not do it at weekends.

The staff have theories. One guard was certain the bird was nesting at the Netherby end and had simply got his geography wrong. A ticket inspector held out for years that he was following a particular passenger who carried sandwiches. The prevailing view now is the least romantic one: the train is warm, the footpath is pretty, and he has found the only arrangement that gets him both.

In his second year the booking clerk made him a season ticket. It is laminated, it is issued to Mr G. Pigeon of Platform Two, it is valid Ashcombe to Netherby, single stop, and it hangs on the noticeboard where it is renewed every September by whoever is on shift. Passengers photograph it. Somebody once wrote in to complain that this was not funny, and three hundred people wrote back to explain, very patiently, that it was.

When the automatic barriers went in last spring, the drawings came back from the contractor with a ninety-millimetre gap at the base of gate three, annotated parcel trolley clearance. Ashcombe has never owned a parcel trolley. The gap has been inspected twice since and passed both times, and on the second visit the engineer wrote as designed in the log, which by then was perfectly true.