As you go about your day to day business every now and then you see something that makes you think that you've stumbled into a parallel world.
I was driving along one day, heading to north Wales, in a line of traffic that was going along at a gentle pace enjoying the tranquility of the countryside that was bathed in glorious sunshine. We approached a roundabout and I felt at one with my fellow travellers in this convoy of strangers who had formed a non-existent bond.
Anyway as the cars entered the roundabout and made their various ways, I saw that it was clear for me and entered the roundabout obeying the highway code rules and feeling at peace with the world.
All of a sudden the car in front of my does an emergency stop halfway over the exit line, I immediately slammed my brakes on, narrowly avoiding smashing into the back of this loon. Luckily the car behind me managed to stop as well and as far as I know everyone else in my imaginary convoy managed to avoid a collision.
Next thing I know, the bloke in the car in front gets out, walks round the back and goes onto the grass verge, by which time there's a queue on this normally quite country road halfway back to the English border. I'm thinking that he's been suddenly taken ill and needs to be sick on the side of the road, but no, he bends down and picks up what looked to be a bird.
I'm still in a state of shock due to the emergency stop to fully focus on what he was doing, but I could just make out that he'd seen some injured bird and he'd stopped to rescue it. As long as he got to that bird nothing else mattered, hand signals, indicators or anything by way of an apology was out of the question as him and what looked to be an half dead pigeon got back into his car.
So I'm now thinking that him and his wife must be some kind of vets who can nurse this poor bird back to life, the very least they were proficient in pigeon first aid and were animal lovers to the extent that nothing else mattered.
Anyway, he gets going and we all start to continue our journey, hoping that we'd had our excitement for the day. All of a sudden this pigeon, or whatever it was, comes flying out of the passenger window, backwards, wings flapping, feathers flying everywhere. It was like a scene out of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon when the fox gets in the hen-house.
Whether this bird had ever flown backwards before we'll never know, but it was making a right mess of it now. It didn't even attempt to reverse its natural wing flapping pattern and tried to fly forward which was not the brightest thing to do as it had just been thrown backwards out of a moving car. Not only was it a bird in shock, but it was now a bald bird in shock as judging by the amount of feathers that were scattering all over the place he couldn't have had many left.
The car in front carried on its merry way and there was no way that I was slamming my brakes on to see how the bird was as it was about 200 yards behind us and no other car was stopping.
There must have been cars further back in the convoy that hadn't seen what had happened previously but had witnessed the bird flapping around about two feet above the ground, "Oh look dear, that bird's flying backwards, how clever. Do you think it's escaped from a circus?"
Darko are a band from Surrey, playing a hard rocking, hard, heavy sound and take no prisoners.
With an incendary live show they are a force to be reckoned with by audiences and are leaving a massive imprint wherever they go.
They've played with quite a number of bands from around the world swelling the numbers to their growing army of fans, who end up losing weight, if not their senses at the end of a Darko show.
See Darko on Radio Woking here
