Leamington Is Full Of The Strangest People, No. 2: Pooper-Scoop Pete

And so to continue with this sporadic series of Leamington vignettes (you can read the first one here if you are so minded) may I introduce you to Pooper-Scoop Pete?

I don’t know if Pete is his real name; I chose it purely for alliterative purposes and thought it sounded better than Turd Trowelling Trevor.

I encountered Pete last Friday as I made my way on foot to my employer’s HQ. Despite the day being so hot it would have melted Katie Price’s breast implants down to her ankles Pete was fully togged out in a tweed suit complete with matching waistcoat. And he was wearing a yellow shirt which I suspect (though cannot confirm) was buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple. He was sporting a full beard in a kind of way that said, “Yes, ruffian, even my face is properly dressed despite the excessive balminess of the weather”.

But strange though his appearance may have been it was not his sartorial qualities that attracted my eye... my eye that seeketh the strange and the paranormal in this bizarre worlde of Leamington upon the Spa.

No. It was the fact that he was very painstakingly picking up a large dog poo from the pavement.

And yet he most definitely did not have a dog. He was totally dog-less.

Worst of all his method of turd collecting was the old “stick your hand in a plastic bag and pick it up with your fingers and then turn the bag inside out” technique. Thus through the thin veneer of the plastic one can fully experience both the ambient temperature and the texture of the poo one is handling.

He had an old fashioned brown satchel slung over his right shoulder. I didn’t see him do it but I suspect the bagged up log was deposited within its leather innards.

The actions of this dedicated sausage removal expert have left me perturbed and confused. I mean why collect dog poo from the streets when you patently don’t have a dog in your possession?

Subsequent speculation on this conundrum has resulted in the following theories (do feel free to add your own):

1) he does indeed own a dog and said dog dropped a length earlier in the day but he found himself plastic bag-less and thus, being conscientious and mindful of his public duty, he returned at his next convenience to remove the offending article.

2) the government is funding some bizarre and secret research into the anti-personnel properties of canine faeces and Pete is collecting samples of the stuff to develop an anti aircraft missile that has true dirty bomb attributes.

3) Pete has a dog log fetish that has resulted in an entire backroom of his Edwardian terraced house (there are a lot of these in Leamington Spa) being given over to his personal “walnut whip” collection – all sorted and displayed according to size, bouquet, and canine breed (worked out using a clever algorithm that uses the diameter of the log to calculate the size of the canine rectum and therefore the most likely breed of the dog). This collection has been kept secret from his elderly mother who lives in a rocking chair in his loft and persists in calling Pete Norman.

Needles to say, I left Pete to his scatological endeavours and hastened on my way to Work’s HQ, praying that I would never have cause to see the insides of that buckled brown leather satchel that was visibly weighing down his right shoulder...

Leamington, eh? It’s full of the strangest people.