David Binelli

  The Squirrel with 3 legs   By David Binelli ©2022 DM Binelli. All Rights Reserved                    2447 words     High in an Ash tree not far from here, there lived a family of grey squirrels. There was Tom, an only squirrel, and his mum and dad. Like all squirrels, they lived in a drey. A drey is a nest of twigs and leaves, all wrapped together with long strands of grass. Inside is lined with a thick layer of moss that helps keep the squirrels lovely and warm when they’re snuggled up together on those long cold winter nights. They had lived in this drey all their lives. It had been built by their ancestors many years ago and there had been squirrels living in it for as long as any squirrel could remember…Although it was old, it kept out the wind and the rain and was a perfect home for any squirrel.  One beautifully sunny day, Tom and his mum were out...

  How does the Hedgehog cross the road?   By David Binelli ©2022 DM Binelli. All Rights Reserved                    2963 words     Horace was a young hedgehog that lived on the edge of the Oak Applewood not far from here. He had lived there all his life. Every day was pretty much the same but he liked that. You see hedgehogs are a bit old fashioned…I don’t mean that in a bad way, just that they like things to stay the same…they don’t care much for change. Every night he would wake as usual at sunset, have breakfast…you can still have breakfast on an evening if you are someone that sleeps during the day and comes awake at night…. and then take a slow walk across the fields, which were only about a hundred metres or so, to his favourite place….a large allotment. Just in case you don’t know what an allotment is it’s a piece of land that humans use to grow veget...

  Love at First Sight   When I look back it didn’t feel like a night that was going to be different from any other night out with the lads. We had been at work all day and as was usual on a Friday night, we couldn’t wait to get into town and start drinking with something to eat later from the bacteria wagon parked at the end of the main street near the taxi rank. The burger van or bacteria wagon as it had come to be called after we all suffered a rather bad bout of food poisoning one night, which was never really proved to have come from there but it didn’t matter because the following day, one of us, and I can’t remember for the life of me which one of us it was, christened the Burger Bar the Bacteria Wagon. So from then on, that has always been its name. With the wisdom that only comes from a group of young lads full to the brim, almost overflowing in fact, with pints of Lager, Red Bull and Vodka, Tequila slammers and flaming Sambuca, it had been decided, god knows h...

  The Virus   It seemed to have come from nowhere, but in reality, it had been around for a few months in a small part of China. Scientists initially thought it originated in Bats and then managed to jump species to us…humans, but some people, and by ‘some people’ I mainly mean the media, thought that it was too much of a coincidence that China had a biological warfare laboratory only yards from where the first incidence of the virus was reported to have come from. Across the world, front-page headlines pronounced the virus had somehow escaped from a laboratory and had been manufactured as a biological weapon, but this was never proved and strongly denied by the Chinese authorities. They did just about everything possible to show that the virus had originated in a live-animal market in a small village that just happened to be near the laboratory. A few people tried to focus on the man-made synthetic-virus-thing for a while but very quickly it was swept under the prov...