D.A.R.E to keep squirrels off drugs!

London's tabloid market is amongst the world's most thriving industries. The sheer volume and absurdity of the rags out here is staggering, and you always have to take what they say with a grain of salt. However, occasionally when reading the legitimate press, one comes across a story so bizarre that you have to do a double-take, and check the flag of the paper you are reading just to make sure someone didn't slip you a copy of the Daily Mirror or something.

Some time ago I read a story about the squirrels here in London. Apparently a problem that is becoming more commonplace is the incidence of junkie rodents. Huh? Well, it seems things go down like this: Squirrels forage for food in the bushes and trees they frequent. Crack heads tend to hide parts of their stash in various parks and lawns. Well, when they twain meet, you end up with squirrels happening across a bad of crack rocks, which they seem to then nibble on to see if they are edible. By eating a crack rock, they are essentially taking a extraordinarly massive hit of coke. (Imagine smoking a crack rock the size of you fist, and I think you get an idea of the scale we are talking here.) It comes as no surprise, then, that they immediately end up being addicted to that sweet sweet coke.

This leads to a problem for the squirrel, though. How to get that next fix? After all, they just lucked onto this stash, and there really aren't any rodent pushers out there that I am aware of. So now people in London report seeing squirrels with bulging eyes furiously digging deeper and deeper into the dirt, desperate to find some crack.

All this got me thinking: Quite a few people take their lunch breaks in parks, as I see a lot of folks enjoying sandwichs in the park. This increases the odds that a squirrel will find the leftover rubbish from one of these sandwiches and end up chancing across a deadly cocktail sword. So, now my biggest fear when walking through parks late at night is that a coked out squirrel (sorry, not talking about you this time, Kate Moss) will pop out of the bushes and try to mug me. The thought of those horrible little eyes goggling out at me, filled with coke-fueled rage, clutching his little plastic sword and jabbing and slashing at me while he chirps and chitters maniacally is almost too much to bear. I used to avoid parks late at night because of the weirdo guys who frequent them. Now I avoid the parks late at night because of the weirdo squirrels who frequent them.

Oh, and a special note to my sister: I remember last year that you had a family of squirrels living in your attic. You had better double-check on them to make sure that they aren't running a meth lab or cooking up some crack up there, or else you might see your home on the evening news under the banner of "Miniature Meth Lab Shocks Neighbors".