WHEN YOU TALK TO ANIMALS YOU SHOULD BEAR IN MIND THE BOLTON DEFENCE

A beautiful morning, the light crisp and translucent; endless shades of new green growth against a blue and hazy sky. The cherry tree across the road is in full bloom, tumbling waterfalls of knicker pink blossom on the pavement beneath. You can understand why the Japanese, sensible and aesthetic people they so often are, set out tables and chairs so that passers-by may better admire the cherry blossoms silhouetted in the spring sunlight against the snow of Mount Fuji.

In the air above a swirl of Jackdaws clacked. One flew down and began to peck at something in the roadway. His left-wing drooped in an injured fashion that reminded me of Max, the Jackdaw I had saved from the cats last August and who had subsequently taken up residence in our garden shed for the next three weeks. He had departed one day, quite suddenly, without so much as a scribbled thank-you note; gone, vamoosed, vanished without a trace.

Yet a few days later, the shed door still left ajar against his improbable return and his favourite brand of digestive biscuit ready in his bowl, I thought I saw him. He had flown out of a high tree as I had been passing and had swooped down to look at me, checking on who I might be, as it were, before flying what I like to think of as a saluting circuit, or rather two circuits, for he circled around me twice, anticlockwise, before veering away.

That was all of nine months ago and I had quite forgotten the incident and so was unprepared when, a few days ago, I noticed the Jackdaw in the road desisting from his breakfast of flattened pizza remains to peer at me with a strange, short-sighted, don't-know-whether-I-should-drop-in-for-a-digestive-biscuit sort of look.

"Max," I whispered hesitantly, "Max, is that you?"

But Max merely looked quizzical and then with a let's-pretend-it-isn't-and-see-what-happens look, took off sharply. After all this was the both the middle of the road and the middle of the school run, and a Yummy Mummy in a not so yummy 4 x 4 was approaching apace.

His wing, so droopy and bedraggled on the ground, evidently offered minimal inconvenience in the air, for in a few hefty flaps, he had regained the elevated sanctuary of the chimney pots.
But he didn't alight there as he might have done. No, he carried on flying. The same anticlockwise circuit, the same port wing held low.

Could this be Max, I mused, as I followed his aerial path? Could it really be the same bird? "Max!" I called forlornly a last time, before he broke off and disappeared no doubt to continue breakfasting in more tranquil surroundings.

Oh dear, I have already got a reputation for talking to animals. What will the mummies, both yummy and slummy, think of someone passing the school talking to the birds?

Still, I thank my stars I live in Wales and not Newcastle where the improbably named Kyle Little was fined £50 the other day for growling at a pair of Labradors, something that the police deemed had distressed both the dogs and her owner, though how they managed to gather their evidence on this point is not stated. The owner did not lodge a complaint, after all and I'm told the Labradors refused to communicate in any language but their own. But perhaps the police these days are trained in the subtler aspects of canine interrogation.

However, all was not lost in Mr Little's world, for in a tale that could have come straight from the pen of A.P Herbert, a blow for freedom, and a defence of the good old British liberty to talk to animals in whatever language you want, was upheld. The case against Mr Little and the allegedly distressed Labradors was dismissed on appeal by Mrs Justice Cocklecarrot herself - here in the sensible and redoubtable shape of Her Honour Judge Beatrice Bolton.

"The law is not an ass," she is reported to have boomed.

Fennie is saved. In future, should a Yummy Mummy dare to tell me off I shall claim the Bolton defence. Hee-Haw, hee-haw.