[billyboy]

Originally Posted by BobClay

Can I tell you about the Weybank which was my first deep sea ship on my own as a sparky. I wasn't completely green when I went to sea as a sparky, cos I did a couple of years as an engine room rating before I went to college and got my ticket.

Anyway, we ended up in Calcutta, literally for weeks discharging cargo and back loading. During this time one of the deck cadets decided he wanted to buy a parrot. So a bunch of us went up to the bird market in Calcutta, (a place I have to admit fills me with horror now) and he bought this peculiar looking bird in a cage and gleefully bought it back to the ship. Thinking, for all I know, he'd teach it to talk and do a Robert Newton with Cap'n Flint on his shoulder about the ship in time.

Alas it didn't quite work out like that.

Whatever drugs the market boys had been feeding this bird wore off after a few hours, it became a f**king velociraptor, screeching and screaming and bouncing off the walls of the cage like a creature risen up from hell. In the end, the cadet took the cage out on deck and let it go (it was clearly wild) and it flew around the ship like a Messerschmitt fighter piloted by a demented harpy scaring the living sh*t out of everybody, before flying off into the sunset I suspect in search of some kind of nuclear weapon with which to exact revenge on human beings in general.

Can't say I blamed it that much.