I don’t want to evoke the (bad? awkward?) Beatles post-John-Lennon-mortem song but bird is no more synonymous of Freedom for the European commuter in these days of avian flu fear.

For the first time today, I had to walk in a one-person line with all the passengers of my train in the Eurostar arrival corridor while a dog was sniffing the queue. I presume they were looking for birds being imported. That’s my theory as this is the first time I see this kind of security at Waterloo and as a parrot had just been reported to die from the dreaded H5N1 strain of bird flu at a UK quarantine centre. Then it could be a drug or terrorism fighting reason but is there such a thing as coincidences?

To end on a more cheerful note, maybe we should blame Jimi Hendrix and not the Beatles, according to that BBC article.