I AM so looking forward to viewing the Les Colombes exhibition which launches in the cathedral this weekend.

The promotional images online are simply lovely, while the spin-off project, City of Doves, will allow the wider community to get involved, too, decorating homes, shops and schools with their own birds that can be used by artist Michael Pendry in future installations.

Doves are so beautiful, aren’t they? Their purity of colour, their gentle cooing … they are symbols of peace, innocence and hope, doing no harm to man nor beast.

Didn’t one bear an olive branch to Noah after the flood, to show that all would be well again with the world? Didn’t they inspire that soaring Mendelssohn anthem, beloved of boy sopranos, that has the power to move grown men to tears?

What’s not to like?

Luckily these ones are only made of paper, otherwise I’d worry about their chances of survival in Salisbury.

Odd, isn’t it, how so many of us, not least our city council, take such a different attitude to their humble cousin the pigeon, though according to the RSPB, there are ‘no strict divisions’ between these members of the ‘columbidae’ family.

So while Salisbury celebrates the dove in its principal place of worship, outside it persecutes the equally peaceable pigeon, labelling it a pest, or a ‘rat with wings’, and our councillors do their darndest to drive it away.

You can’t imagine the great and the good here approving an exhibition entitled City of Pigeons, can you?

The cathedral’s other celebrated residents, its peregrine falcons, wouldn’t make such a distinction, regarding anything that flies as a potentially tasty meal. There’s no such thing as snobbery in the animal kingdom. Just hunger.

According to the cathedral’s website, the art installation’s message is one of ‘hope, humanity and new beginnings’, intended to illustrate Salisbury’s resilience.

Highly appropriate stuff from our spiritual leaders after what the city’s been through lately, and I’m not knocking them.

Just feeling a bit sad, as a bird lover, about society’s double standards.

Bird-brained

THIS is wonderful!

Yesterday, Wiltshire Council’s police and crime panel was meeting in Trowbridge.

The subject under consideration? “Monitoring public confidence in Wiltshire’s police force”.

I suspect that the level of public confidence might be higher if the panel allowed the press and public to listen to their deliberations on this very important subject, instead of excluding them with the usual blanket excuse for official secrecy that “exempt information” may be disclosed.

I’m sure they’ll tell us in due course, in non-specific terms, that everything is hunky-dory. We’ll just have to take their word for it, won’t we?

anneriddle36@gmail.com