Chapter 56 In which we get a bird's eyeview of the goings on in Westphalia-on-Sea

Kenneth Livingston Seagull woke with surprise one late August morning. The surprise was due to the sun, which was suddenly shining in his eyes, something which hadn't happened, since, well, Kenneth couldn't really remember, but he knew it had been a while. He stood up and stretched his wings, and then hopped off the chimney where he had spent the night onto the top of the pitched roof a couple of feet below. Having only just woken up, and having webbed feet, he was a little unsteady on the slippery slates (at least they weren't wet - they were a nightmare then) so he flapped his wings a little for balance as he toddled along the top of the roof which he called home. It was nothing fancy, a three-bedroom terrace in an average part of town, but Kenneth was perfectly happy with it, and it had a little flat roof on an extension at the back, which was great for the kids when they were small and couldn't fly. Of course, he had no financial worries - he didn't have a mortgage, or even a bank account come to that. In fact he made a point of never carrying cash on him, ever since he heard that was what the Queen did. Or didn't. He had friends who lived on big detached houses with sea views, and they were always squawking on about the fresh fish heads you could get down on the coast if you had a mind to get up early, but that didn't interest Kenneth. If fact Kenneth was rather conservative by nature. His wife had recently told him about a swanky new development that was opening up on the seafront and tried to persuade him to move, but Kenneth was cautious. Sure, it was a great location, handy for the harbourside takeaways, and it had all been sealed off with large swathes of blue tarpaulin so the Providers couldn't go there anymore, and it seemed like they would never return. However, some of the Providers were still insisting they would be back, and Kenneth would not be persuaded to move from the roof where he had seen so many of his kids emerge from their eggs. His wife even pointed out that it would be good to get some more fish in their diet instead of living on convenience food, but Kenneth wasn't convinced. In fact he thought all this stuff about seafood and healthy eating was rather unnatural. If they were meant to go out catching fish, why did the Providers leave enormous bags of food out in the street for him? It just didn't make sense.
Kenneth was shaken out of his reverie by the noise of the first few Providers who were starting to appear from their houses below, and he began thinking about some of the crazy theories he had heard about them. Craziest by far was the idea that the Providers were actually the dominant species on the planet. Kenneth didn't believe this for one simple reason: it was the fact that he often saw the Providers out picking up fresh dog's mess, and in his small seagull-sized brain he figured that before any species could really be classed as truly dominant it would have to stop going around picking up the warm excrement of other species and casually slipping it in their pocket. True, the Providers seemed to have invented quite a lot of useful stuff, but they were a weird disorganised bunch and Kenneth should know - he had spent plenty of time observing their antics. Why, only the other day he had watched many of them sitting in their little metal boxes on a the road in Eastphalia. They moved very slowly up towards the traffic lights, but the queue seemed to stretch all the way back to the beach - it was a very strange state of affairs, and Kenneth was very glad that he didn't have to sit about in a queue like that on a warm day. No, he was pretty certain that the species which had organised this was not running the planet. If any of the species down on the ground was running the planet Kenneth thought it was probably the cats. He had seen them lying around doing nothing all day, and they didn't even have to look for food - everything was laid on for them. Each of them seemed to have trained their own personal Provider to handle the catering arrangements, and any time a Provider went away for a few days a neighbouring Provider took care of their feeding duties. It seemed like a very efficient system, and Kenneth was quite jealous of the way these furry layabouts had organised everything exactly to suit them. Yes, the more he thought about it the more logical it seemed - the cats were in charge.

Another idea concerning the Providers was Darwinism. Kenneth had heard about it, of course; what seagull hadn't? This was the mad notion that they were some kind of distant relationship between the Providers and other species, but Kenneth was very sceptical. He just couldn't see the likeness. The only behaviour that was vaguely similar was the way the Providers regurgitated their food late at night around the harbourside, but they didn't do it when their young were around, so Kenneth couldn't see the benefit in that. Some of the more radical gulls said there were far too many Providers around, and that there should be some kind of cull, but Kenneth thought this was a bit drastic. He preferred the other option, which was to let the stupid ones eat too much and die off earlier. Some gulls said this was 'natural selection', and that it was connected to Darwinism, but whenever the discussion began to get more serious Kenneth found he was usually distracted by a bundle of chip papers or the remains of Sainsbury's lasagne, so he lost the thread of the argument and never really got to fully understand what was going on around him.
Oh well, thought Kenneth, as he started lazily running for take-off, I suppose some
day everything will become clear and I'll finally understand what's going on around here. He flapped his wings a few time to get airborne, and continued to flap to get a bit more height. He was soon gliding effortlessly towards the town centre, keeing his eye out for the black binliner that would provide breakfast. Just as he was approaching the Town Hall Kenneth felt a rumbling in his lower intestine. Hmm, I don't think the spicy contents of those foil trays that I ate last night have agreed with me, he thought. With a small movement of the muscles at the rear end of his body he evacuated the problem. Ooh, that feels better, he thought. Once the offending remains had left Kenneth's body he didn't give them a second thought. This was unfortunate, because Kenneth, a thoughtful and rather philosophical seagull, would probably have appreciated the irony of what followed. A man on the ground had just parked his car, and hearing the Kenneth's squawk of relief, looked up. Splat!! The brown mess covered the man's glasses. If Kenneth had looked down at that moment he would have seen a rather angry man standing next to a small car in a parking bay where the word 'MAYOR' was just about visible on the wall.