An eep with its beady eyes
Protect yourself from the eeps!
Eeps (apparently) are a menace to society. They have beady eyes and run with their heads down. They are really just dinosaurs in disguise. Allegedly.
Eeps sit in trees, on chimneys and television aerials, crying “eep” in a monotone. They run up (and down) Windmill Hill and “boonce” (which, it seems, is Geordie for ‘bounce’).
An eep is little more than a Tyrannosaurus rex with good P.R. in much the same way as a squirrel is just a rat with good P.R.
Il merrill: the Maltese eep
Il merrill
It’s not just England: they have eeps in Malta, too. There, they call them il merrill, although they're not strictly eeps as such but the blue rock thrush. For reason best known to the people of Malta, it's the national bird…
We first became aware of it whilst staying in Sliema with my father in October 2004. We saw signs to a family-friendly restaurant in one of the side streets running away from The Strand. Its sign boasts a silhouette that looks just like an eep, but on our honeymoon, we read a beer mat showing il merrill to be the blue rock thrush. Not exactly the Maltese Falcon, but not really the Maltese Eep, either.
Dad, incidentally, never quite got to grips with eeps. Throughout our stay in Sliema, he kept referring to them as “erps”.