I sometimes think I’m the only person in the world who likes seagulls. As a species they appear to be significantly less popular than crabs: all three kinds (snap-snap; itch-itch; and bitch-bitch). I’d go so far as to say they’re probably less popular than an endless loop of Mrs Brown Boys playing on a big screen on the express shuttle-bus service to hell, which never actually reaches hell, and you’re just stuck on a dangerously hot bus watching the same episode of Mrs Browns’ Boys over and over for all eternity, and then after about 400,000 years the penny drops and you’re like, ‘Ah, I see what they feckin’ did there, sure. Well played, Beelzebub. Well played.’

I’ve never heard anyone say anything nice about seagulls. Not once. Ever. ‘Rats with wings’ is about as complimentary as it gets. It’s a shame. They don’t deserve the bad rap they get, bless their ketchup-covered beaks. It’s not their fault we humans leave trails of Happy Meals and chip wrappers from our shores to our town centres. If anyone’s to blame for the unhappy legions of wee dogs and old ladies being dive-bombed with hilarious regularity it’s us. Mankind: we merry band of muckle, messy, bipedal bastards.

Seagulls help more than they hinder. They provide us with an incredible public service, completely tax free, by eating our rubbish and left-overs. That’s really nice of them, isn’t it? I mean, otters are pretty good, I mean, they’re perfectly fine, but they aren’t nipping down the shops for a pint of milk or tidying our kitchens for us, are they? Snobs, that’s what they are. Semiaquatic wankers.

Maybe it’s just me (it’s definitely just me) but I find seagulls soothing. Their soaring shrieks and laugh-like ululations – which tend to inspire nothing but murderous rage in most of my contemporaries – are a panacea for my soul. Whenever I hear their cries I’m able to imagine I’m sitting on a remote beach somewhere; the vastness of the ocean at my feet; the warm breath of the wind lowing gently against my face; the cold comfort of the sand: a man with nothing to do except nothing at all, and all the happier for it.

They cheer me up and make me laugh, too. There’s something intrinsically comical about them. I love the juxtaposition between the serious tones of their faces and the Charlie Chaplin-icity of their bodies, all prat-falls and clownish gait. The sight of a seagull dancing up and down on a patch of grass to coax gullible worms to the surface, legs lifting up and down like malfunctioning pistons, is one of the funniest things you’ll ever see, with the possible exception of Jeremy Corbin dressed as a wizard shouting obscenities at his own penis. When a seagull dashes along a road, its little legs thumping and bicycling beneath its spirit-level-straight body, it’s hard not to imagine their journey being accompanied by the old-timey piano music from ‘silent’ movies.

They’re such adorably silly, sweet and absurd little creatures. Who would wish death upon them? Well, everyone, it seems. Every single man, woman and child on earth. Except me. Most people want to hurt seagulls: force-feed them bicarbonate of soda until their tummies pop like fireworks; or squish them into the ground like guts-flavoured chewing gum; or strap a crocodile to the underside of a helicopter-sized drone and fly it through their flocks like a hungry lawnmower.

My wife wants to kill them, too; no more so than when I arrive home from work with my car stained so severely with poop splat that it looks like the recipient of the world’s largest and most grotesque scat-bukkake. Seagulls come to roost on the roof of my work, you see. For a third to a half of every year, the air around my office is a riot of squawks and shrieks and over-lapping choruses of Mongolian throat-singing, seagull-style. They thump on the skylights with their beaks. They flap and swoop over the car-park like hawks above a field of mice. They shit on people’s heads – sometimes straight into people’s eyes.

I miss them when they go. Especially the eye-shitting part. That’s hilarious.

My wife won’t be swayed from her hatred, though, no matter how much I talk up their quirks. She wants them dead. How dare they shit on our car! How dare they rob what little status or value our little chrome junk-mobile possesses with their corrosive, paint-peeling sky-jobbies? She sometimes asks me to park in the car-park of a neighbouring workplace, and walk the rest of the way to my office from there, in order to protect the car’s integrity, an offer I’ve always, em, politely declined.

I want my wife to love the gulls as much as I do. Why let a little thing like repeated airborne excretions ruin the chance of a perfectly good inter-species friendship? I wish she’d let them into her heart. When we lived in our last home, a third-floor flat, I’d begin every weekend morning by standing on the balcony in my dressing gown, hurling chunks of bread into the sky, and watching as the gulls swooped and dipped and whooshed to catch them as they fell ground-wards; my own private aerial display team. Why couldn’t she love them for that, if nothing else? In the better weather, she’s watched me place bread on my head and shoulders and walk around like some God of the seagulls, sometimes with four of them perched on me at once. She liked that, mind you, but only because one of them shat on my shoulder.

PS: I know there are hundreds of different species of gulls, and seagull isn’t a particularly precise or accurate catch-all label to throw around, but equally I don’t care.

Like all relationships, ours has been tested. The relationship between me and the seagulls, that is. I know the brutality my winged homies are capable of demonstrating. I’m still haunted by memories of the time I witnessed their inhumanity close-up – though I suppose I can’t really judge seagulls too harshly for not possessing humanity, given that they’re seagulls. You know what I mean. In my own defence, inseagullity just sounded daft.

I used to work at the airport, a long time ago now. One afternoon at the end of a shift I was in my car about to pull out of the staff car-park when I saw a couple of seagulls a-strutting-and-a-pecking at a nearby patch of grass, intermittently stopping to squabble with, and viciously peck at, each other. I laughed. Those guys! It was like having private access to Laurel and Hardy, if, you know, Laurel and Hardy had been seagulls. What were they doing, I wondered? I’d never seen them exhibiting this sort of behaviour before. I killed the engine, unclipped my seat-belt and craned my neck to get a better look at them through the windscreen. They were still just out of view, so I got out the car and took a step towards them. Then another step. Then another. And another.

Then horror. Such heart-rending horror.

The seagulls were ripping and tearing at the ears, face and body of a stunned and quivering baby rabbit. What a blow; what cruel disillusionment. It was like finding out your gentle and loving wee gran was secretly a werewolf who’d eaten half your friends. Or chasing Laurel and Hardy into an alleyway for their autograph only to find them beating a baby to death with a set of golf clubs. Not exactly up there with the top ten best laughs of all time.

I ran towards those asshole seagulls, shouting and shooing as I closed on them. They weren’t keen on abandoning their day’s sport, and for just a brief second seemed intent on playing a game of chicken with the big angry human. At the very last moment, though, they flapped off in a huff.

The poor little rabbit was wide-eyed and trembling, its chest rising and falling and vibrating with worrying urgency. It put up no resistance when I softly stroked its fur. That’s how you know a rabbit’s terrified. Usually, the mere suggestion of a human footstep is enough to have them leaping hedgerows like showjumping stallions. I took my phone out and called the airport’s on-site animal welfare/RSPCA team, and maintained a vigil until they came to take the little fella away and tend to his shock. I don’t know what happened to the rabbit after that. I told them never to tell me. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I was angry at seagull-kind for a few hours, but you can’t really hold a grudge against them. Besides, we humans are capable of much, much worse. My own step-dad used to pop rabbits with a pellet gun through his bedroom window, and then run out to the garden to break their necks, or smash their heads against a rock, all because they ate his petunias or disrespected his mother or wore white socks with black shoes or something. We had a garage full of domesticated rabbits when I was a boy, which my step-dad used to breed, and sometimes enter into shows. Unbeknownst to all of us, he was also selling a proportion of those rabbits to a local French bistro. And not to keep as pets. When my mum found out, they were liberated from their death-warehouse and re-homed quicker than you could say ‘Arrete de tuer ces lapins, chatte!’

Anyway, hating fully-grown seagulls is one thing, but their children? How can you detest the baby versions of any warm-blooded animal (with the possible exception of the Trumps)? Every July the roof of my work becomes a creche, where gangly, grey-feathered chicks teeter on the corrugated metal slats, and take their first, uncertain forays into flight. I become a mother hen when I’m around them, always shouting up at them things like ‘Careful up there, now’ and ‘What have I told you?!’ and ‘You treat this roof like a hotel!’

Inevitably, every year a handful of young gulls fall from the roof and find themselves trapped at ground level, away from their mothers and unable to fly back to them. They’re vulnerable on the ground. If a truck or a forklift doesn’t get them, come nightfall, a hungry fox will. I’ve chased chicks around that car-park many times, Benny-Hill-style, desperately trying to get them up a ladder and back on to the roof. I’ve put down water for them, thrown scraps of food. Once, I even tried to get one to hop into my car so I could take it home and raise it as my own. You know what I mean: give it a pipe and call it Gerald, inculcate in it a love of the classics and fine port. Normal stuff. It’s lucky I couldn’t persuade the little fella to become little Jamie Junior, because my wife would’ve thrown us both out on the street.

A few weeks ago my wife, kids and I took a boat trip out to a tiny island in the firth of forth. Getting there was stressful. I should clarify: getting to the boat was stressful. We hadn’t known that South Queensferry, from where we were sailing, was hosting a charity abseil that day. I got us to the town with twenty-five minutes to spare. After twenty-five minutes of driving up and down a half-mile of street yelling and spitting venom (‘I HOPE THEIR NEXT F***ING ABSEIL’S IN HELL!’) my wife and I decided it would be better for our collective sanity if we just cut our losses (THIRTY QUID!) and drove home. Just as I was dawdling the car up the road at almost precisely two minutes to sailing time, I passed a space. SCREECH! SWEAR! ROAR! BADLY PARK! RUN RUN RUN! I hate running at the best of times. I especially hate running whilst carrying a four-year-old child. We could see our fellow passengers boarding the boat in the distance. We ran, ran, ran. My lungs almost exploded, I was panting like a sex criminal, but we made it. Just.

But we made it.

There’s an old abbey on the island, which we dutifully explored. Then we crossed the island to a rocky beach, where there were no people but us, and untold hundreds of seagulls. They circled in whirlpools above the sea. They rolled over the beach in grey-and-white waves. Everywhere we looked they perched, sat, frolicked and strolled, like flocks of feathered families holidaying at the seaside. We were the real tourists. This was their land. And we were welcome there. Or at least tolerated. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine that I was exactly where I was. On an empty beach full of shrieks and whispers. Surrounded by wind and seagulls. In the warm glow of my family.