The Kingfisher - Part One

Adventures of an ornament

There was no way we could have predicted that an innocent Christmas gift from Rachel’s grandma would still be providing such high levels of family entertainment over 20 years later.

We were enjoying a get-together with Rachel’s extended family between Christmas and New Year in about 2002. We drank mulled wine, ate Christmas cake, and exchanged presents. In addition to the usual assortment of chocolates, socks and candles, Rachel’s grandma also presented Rachel and her sister Miriam with an extra little gift. They both unwrapped them at the same time. Miriam’s was a small porcelain frog and Rachel’s was an ornamental bird. It was a kingfisher, about three inches tall, bright blue and perched on a garden fork.

‘I saw those at the shop and couldn’t resist getting them for you,’ said Dorothy, Rachel’s grandma.

‘Thanks Grandma. They are very sweet,’ said Rachel.

And they were very sweet. If you were a grandma, with a fondness for little ornaments.

I was sitting across the room from Rachel and Miriam, but I noticed a subtle little smirk exchanged between them.

We played a few games, ate some more food, and then got ready to leave.

‘I love your frog,’ said Rachel to Miriam, not disguising her sarcasm.

‘It’s not a patch on your kingfisher,’ said Miriam.

‘You can have it if you want,’ said Rachel.

‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly deprive you of it.’

Reading this now, it might come across as though Rachel and Miriam were being mean, heartless and ungrateful for their grandma’s kind gift.

Well, yes, they were.

But it was all innocent and lighthearted and I can assure you that if Dorothy – who sadly died in 2012 – had known that all these years later this kingfisher would still be a regular source of entertainment and a frequent topic of conversation for her two grand-daughters and her six great grandchildren, I know she would have been delighted and found the whole saga very amusing.

The kingfisher, pictured in 2024, with a missing beak and broken fork handle

As we said goodbye to Miriam and her partner Eric in the hallway, Rachel slipped the kingfisher into Miriam’s handbag without her knowing. We thought that would be the last we ever saw of it.

A week later, the kingfisher miraculously appeared on the mantelpiece above the fire in our sitting room. Miriam had visited the day before so must have put it there without us realising. A few days later, Rachel visited Miriam and stashed the kingfisher behind the cushions on the sofa. The next week, we discovered it in our kitchen cupboard.

This continued for a few weeks with the kingfisher swapping houses each time Rachel and Miriam visited each other. It fell out of a cereal packet one day when I was pouring a bowl. It was stashed in a shoe. A coat pocket. In a pot of coffee.

It changed hands so frequently that Rachel and Miriam became extremely suspicious of each other and would insist on searching each other’s bags and pockets before letting the other into their house.

This put a halt to such regular appearances of the kingfisher and things went a little quiet for a while. We assumed the kingfisher’s adventures were over.

Little did we know, they had barely even begun.

We were looking after Rachel’s parents’ dog Misty while they were on holiday, and I went to fill Misty’s food bowl one morning and the kingfisher fell out of the bag of dried dog food into Misty’s bowl. Miriam and Eric (who was now fully on board as an accomplice) had somehow intercepted the handing over of the dog and smuggled the kingfisher into the dog food. Or maybe Misty was involved too.

It was clear we had to get more imaginative if we wanted to return the kingfisher.

A few weeks later we went out for dinner to celebrate Miriam’s birthday. Rachel baked the kingfisher into a cake which was presented to Miriam after the meal. 

The kingfisher and me in 2003

The kingfisher came back to us a few months later, cleverly hidden inside a sealed box of chocolates. We then mailed it back to them in a package that we didn’t put a stamp on. Miriam and Eric had to make a special trip to the post office and then pay the fee in order to receive their mystery parcel. They were not best pleased, and we knew they would be plotting their revenge.

Rachel and I got married in 2004. Just before midnight, we were picked up by a taxi and taken to a hotel 20 minutes from our wedding venue. We were heading to the airport the following day to go on our honeymoon. Our wedding had been the best day of our lives. It had been even more special than we could have imagined. We walked down the hotel corridor hand in hand, opened the bedroom door, and I carried Rachel and her big dress over the threshold into our bedroom.

And there in the middle of the room, hanging from a helium balloon, was the bloody kingfisher, with a little note attached saying SURPRISE!

Miriam and Eric got married in December the following year. We thought about returning the favour and leaving it in their hotel on their wedding night, too. But that was too predictable. We needed to up our game.

They were going to Ko Lanta – an island just off the coast of Thailand – for their honeymoon. A few weeks before the wedding we did some subtle investigative work, and casually asked them all about their honeymoon, what they had planned, and where they would be staying.

And we hatched a plan.

The kingfisher had never been abroad before.

We thought it might be too confusing to explain to a Thai hotel that we wanted the kingfisher placed in Miriam and Eric’s bedroom for their arrival. And we also wanted its appearance to be a bit more dramatic than just being left in a hotel room. Even if it was a hotel room on the other side of the world.

Miriam and Eric’s honeymoon was happening over Christmas. So we decided to put the kingfisher inside a Christmas cracker and ask the hotel staff if it could be left at their dinner table one evening.

This was an extremely high-risk strategy.

At any point in the kingfisher’s journey, its adventure could have come to an abrupt end. It might have got held up in customs. It might have been destroyed in a controlled explosion believed to be a suspicious item. The international mail might have taken too long meaning it would arrive after they had returned to the UK. It might have been disposed of by a hotel employee. My letter might have been misunderstood or ignored completely by the Thai hotel workers. Or the cracker might have been left at the wrong table and ended up in the hands of some other very confused guests.

We knew there was a very strong chance we would never see the kingfisher again. But it was a risk we were willing to take. The kingfisher had already had an extremely varied and adventurous few years of life. And if it ended its journey on an exotic Thai island then it would be a fitting place for it to see out its days.

We prepared the cracker, wrote the letter, and mailed the kingfisher to the Thai island of Ko Lanta.

It was a nervous wait over Christmas and there was an uncomfortable silence from the newlyweds in Thailand. Rachel and I had the feeling that our plan had failed, and the kingfisher was probably sitting on the floor of a Thai sorting office somewhere.

And then Rachel woke to a message from her sister on Boxing Day morning.

OH MY GOD!

Damn you! How the hell did he make it all the way to Thailand?

You’re going to pay for this, Mahoods!

Everything had gone perfectly to plan. Midway through their romantic meal, at an outdoor table on a terrace overlooking the ocean, at a hotel over five thousand miles away, Miriam and Eric were presented with a slightly battered Christmas cracker by a waiter. They thought nothing of it – it was Christmas after all – so pulled the cracker. The kingfisher dropped onto the table between them.

The kingfisher in Ko Lanta, Thailand

We didn’t see the kingfisher for a few months, but we knew he would be back.

The following Easter, Rachel cracked open a big chocolate egg, given to her by Miriam, and inside was the kingfisher.

A few months later, Miriam and Eric drove to Leicester to pick up a new car they had bought. We had feigned interest in their car beforehand and asked all about it, and acquired enough details for me to be able to track down where they were buying it from. I then mailed the kingfisher to the garage a few days before they were due to collect the car, with a letter briefly explaining the story of the kingfisher. When Miriam and Eric climbed into their new car for the first time on the garage forecourt, there was the kingfisher, hanging from the rear-view mirror.

In the five years that followed, Rachel and Miriam had three children each. We saw Miriam and Eric regularly, and Rachel met up with her sister for coffee or at baby groups at least twice a week during these years, which allowed for plenty of options for the kingfisher to be passed back and forth. The novelty and sense of urgency to pass it back had dissipated slightly, so we often went for several months without the kingfisher changing hands. With six young children between us, an ornamental kingfisher became less of a priority.

But it continued its adventures and moved between our families in different ways during these years. The longer the gap between appearances, the bigger the shock when it reemerged.

The kingfisher’s adventures had taken its toll on its body. It was looking a little worse for wear. It lost its beak after it was hidden under the windscreen wipers of our car, and then catapulted across the road when I tried to clear my window. It also lost the handle of its fork at some point, and fell off its perch several times too. It was regularly glued back onto its garden fork, but its beak and fork handle were lost forever somewhere.

For the first ten years of the kingfisher’s life, we lived just 15 minutes away from Miriam and Eric. This allowed for frequent meetups and plenty of opportunities for the kingfisher to change hands.

In 2013, we moved to Devon.

250 miles away from Miriam and Eric.

And 250 miles away from the kingfisher.

We still got to see each other a couple of times a year, but it meant that we all had to think of new and more creative ways for the kingfisher to pass between families.

And boy did we think of some.

To be continued…