Pastor Terry Jones and my Dead Squirrel

There seemed to have been a lot of selling points for having a garden at the time. Great for the kids, BBQs etc.

Since acquiring a large expanse of urban grass I have also been counting the downsides. The fact the bugs make it too dangerous to hang out in for half the year, the pine cones that need to be removed all the time and the quick growing grass.

I have a special face for mowing the lawn. It isn't a pleasant one. Women pushing babies past in strollers tend to cross the road when they see it playing over my features. Even the rough mothers - the ones whose strollers are packed with enough crack to keep Whitney Houston going for a couple of days, look afraid.

The lawn mower's a pig anyhow. Half of the time it doesn't start and the rest of the time you have to douse it with gasoline and light a match. I thought about starting my own landscaping company.I thought again.

Now I have putrefying wildlife to add to the list of garden gripes. The kids had been going on about a dead bird so I set out to investigate one bright morning, magnifying glass in hand like Sherlock Holmes at a crime scene. I got suspicious when I saw the curled up foot. The dead bird turned out to be a putrefying squirrel and it stank. The dead squirrel was the best argument I have ever seen for cremation.

It was also covered in crawling things. Even after three garbage liners the smell was discernible. We shoved it outside gate with a vague plan of dropping it into the wheelie bin of a neighbor we didn't like. But nobody was brave enough to carry it across the street so it resided on the front lawn until Friday when household refuse is picked up.

Had I been more resourceful I would have found a way of delivering the aforementioned squirrel to Pastor Terry Jones, a man who has made more unsavory headlines by hanging an effigy of President Obama on a noose outside his church in Gainesville, Florida. This may have been a cue for some bizarre looks at the post office, though.

In 2010 Jones courted more controversy by threatening to burn 1,000 copies of the Quaran. He incidentally ruined my day when I was asked to find outraged Muslims in a city with few Muslims and worked long hours finding the information for an article only for Jones to renege on his threat and for my article to be scrapped on deadline.

Of course this wasn't the most serious casualty of Jones' actions.

He later staged the burning of Islam's holy book last year. That event was blamed for subsequent riots and the killings of at least seven United Nations workers in the Middle East.

Whatever your political affiliation or religious view, I think it's an indisputable fact that this man is a moron. And don't even get me started on his fashion sense. It's a real shame about the putrefrying squirrel because it had Terry's name written all over its fast disappearing features.