Imagine, if you will, a hot sunny afternoon in Tingalpa (Brisbane). It has been boiling all day and my brother, Bill, and I have been looking forward to a nice cool dip in the spa. I go out to the spa first and notice a few magpies grubbing around in the ashes of the fire. I think the magpies are after the bruised piece of pear that I spat out onto the ashes.

“That’s funny,” I think to myself, “I thought magpies were mainly carnivorous.”

I throw the half-eaten core of the pear onto the ashes because I think the magpies might like some more of my juicy pear. They ignore it and I wish I had eaten a little more of it myself – ungrateful birds.

I say hello to Manuela, the girl (in the red and yellow spotty swimming costume) who I painted on the fence last year, and I get into the spa. Bill soon joins me and we spend a few minutes removing leaves. At last the pool is sparkling clear and Bill and I dunk ourselves low in the water (to avoid the mosquitoes) and we kick around and do a number of those little exercises one always does when one is in a spa (because you can’t actually swim, and you have to do something!). So I’m doing a bit of scissor action with my legs and I’m looking in the direction of the table, and I see that one of the magpies has picked something up in his beak – I think it is a red credit card.

“Bill,” I call out, “that magpie has something in his mouth!”(They can be very human-like.) “Is it a credit card?”

“Credit card?” Bill looks. “That’s not a credit card, that’s my cigarettes!” (He has very flat cigarettes on account of them being in his short’s back pocket.)

With that the wily magpie realises there is no time to waste and he flies off the table, straight over the Ute and down to the end of the garden where he thinks we won’t follow because we’re having such a great time in the spa. The magpie does not realise that cigarettes are almost as expensive as gold-dust in Australia these days and even three flat cigarettes are worth leaping out of a spa for. So Bill jumps out, as quick as a flash, and I follow a tad slower (well, they aren’t my cigarettes). I half hope that the cheeky magpie gets clean away over the far fence into the neighbour’s place – it could be a good time to give up! – but he becomes nervous with Bill hollering at him and he drops it under the tree on our side of the fence.

I am back in spa already (no point in two of us searching) and Bill hides the flat cigarettes under my towel before getting back in. I’m still marvelling at how those cigarettes looked like a credit card and Bill, who is keeping vigilant, sees a magpie hooking a cigarette butt from the ashes. “Crikey, he’s desperate for a smoke!” I think to myself. I reckon that Bill wishes he had never started smoking outdoors. Those magpies are very impressionable. I told you they were like humans.