Well the Mineral House menagerie increases again courtesy of Crumpet and Stud Muffin. As I see that Kate has already explained, Crumpet had been some way over her expected time. In fact Kate has redone her maths and now believes she was the equivalent of 42 days overdue, so Muffin was probably lucky to have got away from the other night with his life.
They may look like cute little rabbits, but my god they can be aggressive.
Which leads me onto Kate’s relaxed and innocent description of how she removed little Crumpets from her little run and, whilst gently cuddling little crumpet, took the time to check the nesting box and see that there were in fact at least two little babies snuggling up in the fur that little crumpet had laid down in the box.
As I read that I thought to myself how little this resembled the true scene that we lived out this morning.
Crumpet’s home has quite a large door that allows you to place your entire torso inside in order to view the nesting box.
Did either Kate or I do such thing with Crumoet still in her home?
Of course not. the fact was that whilst she avoided any attempts for either of us to take hold of her, she had taken up position to the side od the door growling in an impressively aggresive way for a satin angora rabbit and quite clearly threatening to tear out the throat of the first person daft enough to stick their head into her house.
So obviously under these circumstances, neither Kate nor myself were about to lay down our lives to see if little sweet Crumps had perhaps done the unexpected.
So we decided to remove Crumpet and then look into the nest.
Sounds easy doesn’t it. A cute little bunny to be picked up so that we could have a look at what’s in her home.
Then again if you’ve ever seen ‘The Omen’ you’ll know what we were really facing. I enjoy life and there was no way I was about to give it all because of a psycho rabbit. So, as Kate had refused to wrestle her little baby from her home I was left with the duty of lifting her out in order to check the nest.
Now picture this. Crumpet now stood half in her nest and half on the top of the stairs to the nest, proudly suggesting that no *%*^£@ human was getting in there past her. Hence the need for me to wearing a pair of elbow length industrial grade suede leather gauntlets in order to coax her out.
Even with these precautions it took a good fifteen minutes to get her out, but the time was worth it. If we’d rushed I could have lost more than two fingers.
Anyway after all that we discovered that angora bunnies are ugly as sin.
Skipping back in time, last night Kate and I went out on a Treasure Hunt with people from Kate’s work. The last time I did a Treasure Hunt was as a child in Saltford on foot and we won a Rubik’s cube each. A real one mind, not one of the cheap copies.
On the basis of that I felt I was going to be quite qualified to guide our team of 2 to respectable mid-table position. Obviously I appreciated Kate coming along to make up the numbers and to write things down; that would save me having to repeatedly stop the car.
So having done reasonably well in the pre-start warm-up I was confident I was in the right frame of mind and when Kate had managed to press the button on the pen I felt that I was going to be pretty impressive on the intellectual front.
This was just further confirmed when the first question, a cunningly cleverly concealed question that involved counting the number of street lamps in castle carrock, was easily despatched.
At this point I knew I was on a roll.
This was also the last answer that I participated in. Actually that’s not entirely true. We did in fact get a few answers wrong and I did most certainly participate in those.
The realisation of this fact became apparent when the second question was ‘How far to the golf course?’ I was looking out for sign posts when Kate suddnly shouted something about ‘is Turnberry a golf course?’
Who cares? We’re looking for a golf course sign!
Then Kate explained the concept of cryptic clues. My night was ruined.
Fortunately Kate is a natural.
In fact Kate singlehandedly got 3rd place, just 2 points behind the winners.
Hope she doesn’t read this. There’s only room for one big head in this house.
Anyway, we’ve kept the questions to the Treasure Hunt and have realised that by changing a few small details, what lasted a couple of hours for us could last any of our visitors a day at least. Can’t wait to see you all.
O no! Perhaps we’ll come up by train …. Treasure – hunting by train could take even longer than by car!