A change of direction

I was going to write something about having all the time in the world because that was Sarah's prompt for today. However, as I went to my blog and saw that my last posting was entitled 'White Rabbits' I'm going to go off at a completely different tangent.

Today has been another fairly trying day for one reason and another with some fairly serious issues to address, the details of which I won't bore you now. Peversely, amongst all these domestic trials and tribulations, I took the rabbits to the vet to be castrated. It started badly when I went to grab the catch on the hutch door and instead felt my fingers sinking into a fat slug. And that was only the beginning. Bramble is a slippery chap and he played games with me, disappearing as soon as I loomed over the hutch with the intention of scooping him up. When I took a few steps back (carefully avoiding the rain-sodden dog faeces on the lawn disguised cunningly amongst fallen conkers) he would re-emerge from his bedding area. This went on for some time whilst I got soaked in the rain, increasingly mindful of the time slipping away, their appointment with fear approaching and the local school-run-scrum clogging up the roads, competing for tarmac against the Tuesday visit from the dustbin lorry. Eventually, I won and it wasn't long before I had arrived at the vets victoriously having fought off the traffic which seemed to be coming from all directions. I felt like I had just run naked across a battlefield but at least we had got there.

I contacted the surgery at 4pm and said 'I'm just phoning to see how our rabbits are following their castration?'. I'm really not sure what sort of response I had anticipated or whether had put either one of them on the phone, they would have been as cheery about it all as the receptionist.

Imagine this for a moment: you can't stand your next door neighbour, in fact, the very sight of him causes you to see red and any meeting - however accidental - ends in a punch-up and one of you getting a bloody nose. He's not the sort to be reasoned with. He never says a word to you but wouldn't hesitate to urinate in your direction given the opportunity. Now then, someone has come up with a solution. You're going to be castrated. Next, the perpetrator of this deed phones up the surgery to ask how you are. What would you say?

So I've had a bad day and the perfect end to it is the discovery that Holby's not on tonight and it's my favourite programme. Still, it could be a lot worse. Our next door neighbours are very pleasant.